consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indif ference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure!" The bargaining match with Maggie, the Fairport fishwife, is one of the gems of the story. Mr. Charles Reade offers a racy pendant in his trafficking encounter between Christie Johnstone, the pride of Newhaven, and the four Irish merchants who have agreed to work together, and to make a show of competition, the better to keep the price down within bounds, but who are no match for woman's wit and woman's tongue, as exercised by Christie. The author of "Doctor Jacob" depicts in Herr Schmidt a rosy, round man, with eyes that were never in tune with his mouth; the former being sharp, Jewish, and speculative; the latter, supine, commercial, and conservative: "He made use of his eyes when he bought, and of his mouth when he sold, giving his customers to understand that he was the easiest going man in the world, only desirous of small profits, and by no means miserable if a gold watch or any other article went for half its value." Canon Kingsley enlivens the adventures of "Hereward" with a certain Dick Hammerhand, the richest man in Walcheren, who tries to overreach the hero, and fails to his cost; one stage of the transaction taking this turn: "The less anxious the stranger seemed to buy, the more anxious grew Dick to sell; but he concealed his anxiety, and let the stranger turn away, thanking him for his drink," but anon renewing the treaty with as much semblance of disregard as he could put on. The author of "The Gayworthys" works up a clever bit of homely chaffering between Mrs. Vorse and Widow Horke the strawberry-dealer. And we find ourselves between a couple of horse-dealers again in "Silas Marner:" "Bryce of course divined that Dunstan wanted to sell the horse, and Dunstan knew that he divined it (horse-dealing is only one of many human transactions carried on in this ingenious manner); and they both considered that the bargain was in its first stage, when Bryce replied ironically, [to the other's boast of a recent high bid,] 'I wonder at that now, I wonder you mean to keep him; for I never heard of a man who didn't want to sell his horse, getting a bid of half as

much again as the horse was worth,'" etc. Trust Bryce to boast of that horse, and of that bargain, so soon as he is gone his way, the horse his, and the bargain made. It must be a distorted type of human nature that resembles the discontented man of Theophrastus, who, after taking a great deal of pains to beat down the price of a slave, and after he has paid his money for him, instead of boasting, breaks out into the grumble, "I am sure thou art good for nothing, or I should not have had thee so cheap." A companion picture, in its way, but with the difference between an inveterate grumbler and an impenetrable oaf, is that by Plautus of a fool with an old grange to sell, of which property he advertises the singular attractions to draw buyers to bid and buy. Nothing ever thrived on it, he says; no owner of it ever died in his bed; the trees were all blasted; the swine died of the measles, the cattle of the murrain, the sheep of the rot; nothing was ever reared there, not a duckling, or goose. Hospitium fuit calamitatis. It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer? No, the seller, in this

case.

A

GRAY-HAIRED UNAWARES.

HOSEA vii. 9.

MONG the reminders and remonstrances which it was the mission of the prophet, the son of Beeri, in the days of Ahaz and Hezekiah, to deliver to Ephraim, there was this significant passage, expressive of a reckless people's unconscious decline, whose lapses were taken account of on high, and Ephraim knew it not-" Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not."

Who, asks Hartley Coleridge, ever saw their first gray hairs, or marked the crow feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a momentaneous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that youth is fled for ever? "None but the blessed few that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal blossoms a

promise that the season of immortal fruit is near." Gray hairs, in an advancing stage of the plural number, may be here and there upon us before we know of it. But the actual discovery of the first is a bit of an epoch in one's life; and if one exclaims Eureka! it is hardly in the most jubilant of tones or the most exultant of tempers.

Falstaff was surprised into a full purpose of amendment of life when he lighted on the first white hair on his chin; but only to keep on renewing the purpose weekly, long after chin and head, too, must have been covered with silver or snow.

With some the humour is to pass off the discovery in seeming glee; and perhaps it is the saturnine, melancholy temperament that is likeliest to do this. For instance, Gerbier relates of Charles the First, that one morning "as the King was combing his head, he found a white hair, which he sent to the Queen in merriment. Henrietta Maria immediately wrote back that Don Carlos would cause many more to come up before the Emperor gave up the Palatinate." Had the King not been himself combing his head on this not too auspicious occasion, the probability is, as courts and courtiers go, that his first white hair would not thus have been allowed to attract and invite attention. A courtly dresser would have been shocked to reveal what he saw, and would have kept the secret with ex officio conscientiousness. Many and many are the uncrowned heads upon which gray hairs are gathering here and there a familiar sight enough to overseeing (and not overlooking) attendants or friends, but by the owners themselves unsuspected as yet. Mrs. Browning lets Aurora Leigh espy one such straggler, which even the neat-handed maid-in-waiting overlooks, at Lady Waldemar's toilet :

"Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil

Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich

Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a gray hair,
A single one,-I saw it ; otherwise

The woman looked immortal."

It is among the graver of his Recreations that a clerical essayist pictures to himself man or woman, thoughtful, earnest,

and pious, sitting down and musing, at the sight of the first gray hairs. Here is the slight shadow, he puts it, of "a certain great event which is to come;" the earliest touch of a chill hand which must prevail at length. "Here is manifest decay: we have begun to die. And no worthy human being will pretend that this is other than a very solemn thought. And we look backward as well as forward: how short a time since we were little children, and kind hands smoothed down the locks now grown scanty and gray." So in Mrs. Southey's (Caroline Bowles') tender, simple verses on the same trite theme :—

"Some there were took fond delight,
Sporting with these tresses bright,
To enring with living gold

Fingers now beneath the mould

(Woe is me!) grown icy cold.

Now again a shining streak
'Gins the dusky cloud to break ;-
Here and there a glittering thread
Lights the ringlets, dark and dead-
Glittering light!-but pale and cold-
Glittering thread!—but not of gold.

Silent warning! silvery streak!
Not unheeded dost thou speak.
Not with feelings light and vain,
Not with fond, regretful pain,
Look I on the token sent

To declare the day far spent."

Mr. Thackeray makes his youngish widow, Amelia Osborne, take tranquilly enough this sort of revelation. "In these quiet labours and harmless cares the gentle widow's life was passing away, a silver hair or two marking the progress of time on her head, and a line deepening ever so little on her fair forehead. She used to smile at these marks of time." Which accords with her placid temperament. Quite otherwise constituted is Currer Bell's Madame Beck. "A loud bell rang for morning school. She got up. As she passed a dressingtable with a glass upon it, she looked at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown tresses; she

plucked it out with a shudder." That is an early phase of the decadence of which Mr. Robert Browning graphically depicts a later stage:—

"One day, as the lady saw her youth

Depart, and the silver thread that streaked
Her hair, and, worn by the serpent's tooth,
The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked--
She wondered who the woman was,

So hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked."

Mr. Trollope's Captain Cutwater is the representative of a large constituency in at least this one salient particular, that he "had no idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men of his own stamp, who had grown gray and bald and rickety and weak alongside of him," that when he moved into a younger circle, and settled there, he ignored the disparity of ages. In Juvenal's emphatic phrase, old age steals upon us unawares,-unperceived, unrecognised : obrepit non intellecta senectus. This stealthy in-coming, or oncoming, of old age is an iterated topic in the classics. Cicero, indeed, had been beforehand with Juvenal, almost word for word: non intelligitur quando obrepit senectus. There is Ovid, again, with his "stealthy lapse" of age, beguiling as it wears away: labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas; and with his elsewhere reminder, that time glides on, and with noiseless years we grow older till we grow old: Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis. Without, as Hazlitt says, our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us. Leigh Hunt somewhere comments feelingly on the difficulty of learning how narrow and dim a boundary separates mature from old age; and quoting his own personal experience, says, that a single illness made the line of demarcation clear to him. So M. de Ste.-Beuve: Rien n'est penible à démêler comme les confins des ages: il faut souvent que quelque chose vienne du dehors et coupe court.

There is all the more force in the kindly wish of Mr. Tennyson's Will Waterproof, that the plump object of it may live long, ere from his topmost head the thickset hazel dies; long,