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difficulty, "labor ipse voluptas," through the stiff clay, till they reach your coffin at last-and free from all sumptuary laws is then their coiling revelry in the very core of your heart.

A pleasant superstition this for an elderly gentleman angling his way down the Tweed, However, to prolong the lives of a few thousand of those dancing ephemera to the close of a vernal day, let us put to death a brace of flyflappers in this pool. There was a rise by an elephant. Poo-poo-merely a par! Had we not hooked the imp, we should have told a story, for years to come, of the lost prodigy. "Tis just the same in coursing. Every leveret that escapes the greyhounds by darting into a drain, or squatting in a ditch, is declared to have been as big as the Witch of Endor. It was so too with the American sea-serpent, that lay floating many a rood, each coil of his body being like a cask, till a schooner ran him down, and the poor devil was not ten feet long from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. So with a tiger that devours villages. When you come to stuff his skin, he is among the least in a museum. So with the eagle twelve feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. Come upon him when gorged, and before he can flap himself into the ether, dash out his brains with a club, and the distance is but seven feet four. So with a fire in a remote part of the city, burning a whole street or square. Follow a fireman, and you see a beggarly blaze in a tailor's garret. So with earthquake toppling down, in a newspaper, a distant metropolis with all its towers and temples. Had you been present, with a late number of the Edinburgh Review in your hand, the shock had never waked you from your dose of political economy.

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'Waly, waly down the bank—and waly down the brae," and what, by chucking out the small fry, two at a time, and humouring the large ones into land-lubbers, our pannier is about twothirds full, and has for some hour or so past felt heavy, and not without friction, on the shoulder. Are we indeed upwards of threescore? Why should not we yet marry? Not "a wee thing just come frae her mammy," but a buxom nymph of a certain age well read in Mrs Rundell, and who could even cut out and put together, at her leisure hours, breeches for our future Tommys. More unfeasible schemes have been put into execution; and all that Buchanan Lodge desiderates is the soft fall of a kid shoe, and the rustle of a silk petticoat. Fair reader! thou art the very woman-hide thy blushes behind the Magazine, and sleep with it to-night beneath thy pillow, for the sake of thy devoted Christopher.

Gay, gamesome streamlet, that comes dancing into the Tweed from Talla Linns, let me follow up thy murmurs for a mile or so, and, by way of a finale, take a bathe in the Silver Pool, so named by shepherds for its perpetual pellucidity.

We must not, however, like Alexander in the Cydnus, plunge in without waiting for a cooler. Alexander, however, did not wear flannel next his skin, as we have done from the year eighty, or he had escaped his fever. That long narrow gulley is an admirable air-bath. Indeed, every green chasm among the braes has a breeze as well as a rill of its own, and as you pass along up the main valley, itself but narrow, every hundred yards or two, some unseen air-nymph, waggishly disposed, gives you a refreshing flirt of her fan. Bless us, what sounds are these mixing with the murmurs of the Silver Pool! Voices and laughter, and the splashing of water! Diana and her nymphs bathing, by all that is beautiful! It is fortunate for us that no pack of hounds is kept in this neighbourhood, otherwise we might fear the fate of Acteon. Here let us take up a position behind this large stone

the screen-scene in a new "School for Scandal.” Sweet creatures-not one of them more than eighteen! The Scotch are a fair-skinned people that is obvious-and it is quite a mistake to imagine that rural labour necessarily spoils the female form. It is devoutly to be hoped that these merry mermaids will not drown themselves, pulling and hauling each other about so deliriously; and now and then all invisible together below the water, except by the yellow gleam that changes the Silver Pool into the pool of gold. "Ye five cruel wretches, are you absolutely going to hold that dark-tressed shrieker under the too high and too heavy shower-bath of the waterfall? Let go your hold, or I will dart down upon you, and rescue the fair child from jeopardy."

The yell is in our ears yet that replied to our extorted ejaculation. You may have seen the effect produced upon half-a-dozen wild ducks sportively dallying on their own small moorland tarn, by a sudden discharge of slugs or swanshot. One of them plumps out of sight in a moment, and makes no sign. Another gives an awkward dive, preceded by a flourish of her tail, but cannot keep her poor wounded self from coming up to the surface. Here one lies floating quite dead among the water-lilies-and there another goes whizzing and whirring and whirling in the strangest antics, while the feathers are floating about in all directions. The other couple fly off quacking with outstretched necks and drooping sterns, and effect their escape to a distant fen.

Even so was it now in the Silver Pool. The image occurred to us at the time; but it has since brightened into a more perfect similitude. Unluckily for us, the two who made their instantaneous escape from the pool, not knowing in their alarm whence had come the voice, came in their scrambling flight up the rocks, due north. We involuntarily cried out-" Ye ho! Ye ho!" wishing, half in love, half in fear, to arrest the fair pilgrims' progress, when, flinging

her train; and from some glade in the forest, the peeping sylvans stole partial glances of the virgin goddess. Then why, since "ut pictura poesis," be offended by the description of North more than of Poussin? Homelier, indeed, are the names and the natures of his bathing beauties; yet chastity is the virtue by which Scotia's shepherdesses are guarded and adorned; and the waters of the Talla, are they not as pure as those of the Ilissus ?

Let us then re-angle our way down the pastoral rivulet, and leave the laughing lassies in the linn. Soon will they collect their scattered garments, and with playful titterings reapparel their innocence. Already is the pearly moisture wrung from their hair, and adjusted every silken snood. Fresh-breathing balm from every warm

somersets backwards, they went with a plump and a plunge into the water, and on re-rising to the surface, lay by a beautiful instinct, with just the tips of their noses out, from which we could not but observe the little air-bells bubbling all over the subsiding pool. The whole was still as death. We began seriously to apprehend that six young women were about to lose their lives; yet there was great difficulty, delicacy, and danger in any scheme for their deliverance. Byand-by a sweet Doric tongue was heard breathing from the waters-"What for are ye sittin' glowerin' there, ye auld chiel? Siccan behaviour's a great shame for ane o' your years; and I wadna hae expeckit it o' you, when you was playing thae bonny tunes last nicht wi' tears in your een. For gudesake, sir, tak aff your specks-gang awa wi' you-and let a set o' puir naked lassies geted bosom again blends with the fragrance of the to their claes!" The appeal to our humanity was irresistible, as indeed at all times it is from a female in distress. "Pardon us, our dearest Girzie," we tenderly exclaimed; and then, for the first time, looking modestly to the ground, we saw ourselves encircled with all the possible varieties of female apparel, which to name profanely would incense against us the Eumenides. Truth and simplicity spoke in every tone of our voice; and Girzie, raising her weel-faured face from the foam, with a neck shown just down to the snow that covered her beating heart, conscious, as we thought of her charms, nor even, in her bashful disquietude, unproud of their manifest effect on a man well stricken in years, said, in still sweeter accents and with imploring eyes"That's a bonny man-gang your wa's-and dinna tell ony stories, na, about our ploutering, to the lads."-"Will you promise to give me a few kisses, then, Girzie, ony time we chance to forgather, and I'll gang my wa's?"-"Ou ay, Mr North-ou ay, sir-but oh! gang your wa's, for Tibbie's just chockin' ower-by yonner aneath the water-pyet's nest-and Kirsty's drank a gallon at the least, and maun be sair swalled. Oh! gang your wa's, my bonny Mr North-gang your wa's." We felt it was indeed time to "gang our wa's;" for Girzie, as she was growing more and more impassioned in her beseeching, rose higher and higher from the water, and stood nearly to the waist unveiled, the long-sought Naiad of the Slver Pool of Talla.

hill-flowers-a brighter crimson is on every cheek -a brighter radiance dances in all their eyes-and down the braes like birds they fly, and not without a choral song. With many a gleesome smile over their strange adventure, they part in a little broomy hollow, and each wings her way towards her own nest. Each carries her blooming beauty into a home gladdened by her presence-all household affairs are cheerily attended to by them whose limbs health has braced; and what difficulty is there in imagining any one of them to be the wooed maiden of the "Cottar's Saturday Night?" for this is indeed the last day of the week, and Robert Burns-hallowed be his memory !-sung then a strain true to the manners and morals of Scotland over all her hills and plains.

Accompany us, in imagination, next day to Tweedsmuir Kirk, and the same voices will be sweetly singing the psalm of worship-one maiden sitting between her parents-one near her lover-one with her little brother on her knee: all thoughts of labour or of amusement will then be hushed, and the small house of God overflowing with thankfulness and praise. The low galleries, the pews beneath them, the seats in the main body of the kirk, forms set in the middle lobby, and even the very stairs up to the pulpit, all covered with well-dressed people, sedate in rational piety. At the close of the service, family parties form in the kirkyard, and move away through opposite gates, each towards its own hill-home. And what if old Christopher North go with the minister to the manse-partake of a dinner yesterday prepared

Gentle reader! be not displeased with this picture, for, remember, that to the pure, all things are pure; and thou, we know well, art the very soul of purity. Often, mayhap, hast-all but one dish which is warm, a few Tweed thou, leaning on friend's or lover's or husband's arm, moved slowly along the picture-gallery of some peer's palace, and for a moment hast let thine eyes dwell on some nymph scene, in some place of waters, trees, and precipices, with its gleam of azure sky. No painful emotion blushed around those eyes, when the huntress queen, wearied with the chase, stood disrobed among

trouts of his own catching-and having laid aside his Saturday's merriment, with his green velvet jacket and jean trousers, and with his black suit put on a spirit befitting the day-enjoy a few such serious hours as no man having heart and soul can ever forget, who has passed a Sabbath evening in the manse of a Scottish minister.

HUGH MILLER. BORN 1802: DIED 1856.

(From “Essays, Historical and Biographical,” etc.)

THE NEW YEAR.*

ERE our sheet shall have passed from the press into the hands of our readers, we shall have entered on a new year. It is barely ninety degrees distant from us at the present moment. It landed on the eastern extremity of Asia as the 1st of January 1845, just as we were rising from our breakfasts in Edinburgh on the 31st of December 1844; and it has been gliding westwards towards us, in the character of one o'clock in the morning, ever since. In a few hours more it will be striding across the backwoods of America, in its seven-league boots, and careering over the Pacific in its canoe. And then, at some undefinable point, not yet fixed by the philosopher, it will find itself transformed from the first into the second day of the year; and thus it will continue to roll on, round and round, like an Archimedes screw, picking up at every gyration an additional unit, until the three hundred and sixty-five shall be complete.

seaman in his bark embayed in the Adriatic. And then, after marking the red glare of Etna reflected in the waves that slumber around the moles of Syracuse,-after glancing on the towers of the Seven-hilled City, and the hoary snows of the Alps,-after speeding over France, over Flanders, over the waves of the German Sea, will be with ourselves, and the tall ghostly tenements of Dun-Edin will re-echo the shouts of the High Street. Away, and away, it will cross the broad Atlantic, and visit watchers in their beacon-towers on the deep, and the emigrant in his log-hut, among the brown woods of the west; it will see the fire of the red man umbering with its gleam tall trunks and giant branches, in some deep glade of the forest; and then mark, on the far shores of the Pacific, the rugged bear stalking sullenly over the snow. Away, and away, and the vast globe shall be girdled by the zone of the new-born year.

"

Many a broad plain shall it have traversed, that is still unbroken from the waste,-many a The past year has witnessed many curious moral wilderness, on which the Sun of Righteouschanges, as a dweller in time; the coming year ness has not yet arisen. Nearly eighteen and has already looked down on many a curious a half centuries shall have elapsed since the scene, as a journeyer over space. It has seen shepherds first heard the midnight song in Cochin-China, with all its unmapped islands, Bethlehem: "Glory to God in the highest, and the ancient empire of Japan, with its cities peace on earth, goodwill to the children of and provinces unknown to Europe. It has heard men. And yet the coming year shall pass, in the roar of a busy population amid the thousand its first visit, over prisons, and gibbets, and streets of Pekin, and the wild dash of the mid- penal settlements, and battle-fields on which night tides as they fret the rocks of the Indian the festering dead moulder unburied; it will Archipelago. It has been already with our see the shotted gun, and the spear, and the friends in Hindustan; it has been greeted, we crease, and the murdering tomahawk, slaves in doubt not, with the voice of prayer, as the slow their huts, and captives in their dungeons. It iron hand of the city clock indicated its arrival will look down on uncouth idols in their temples; to the missionaries at Madras; it has swept over worshippers of the false prophet in their the fever jungles of the Ganges, where the scaled mosques; the Papist in his confessional; the crocodile startles the thirsty tiger as he stoops Puseyite in his stone allegory; and on much to drink, and the exposed corpse of the benighted idle and bitter controversy among those holders Hindu floats drearily past. It has travelled over of the true faith whose proper work is the conthe land of pagodas, and is now entering on the version of the world. But the years shall pass, land of mosques. Anon it will see the moon in and a change shall come: the sacrifice on Calher wane, casting the dark shadows of columned vary was not offered up in vain, nor in vain Palmyra over the sands of the desert; and the hath the adorable Saviour conquered, and dim walls of Jerusalem looking out on a silent ascended to reign as King and Lord over the and solitary land, that has cast forth its interim nations. The kingdoms shall become His kingtenants, and waits unappropriated for the old doms, the people His people. The morning predestined race, its proper inhabitants. In rises slowly and in clouds, but the dawn has two short hours it will be voyaging along the broken; and it shall shine forth more and more, cheerful Mediterranean, greeting the rower in until the twilight shadows shall have dispersed, his galley among the isles of Greece, and the and the sulphurous fogs shall have dissipated, and all shall be peace and gladness amid the blaze of the perfect day.

* Published January 1, 1845.

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THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

AFTOR, LANOX AND FILEEN FOUNDATIZE

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