ture can make of itself. My informant tells me that a gentleman who had been in the habit of receiving this man's annual contribution to some philanthropic society, congratulated himself that, on his next visit to the happy legatee, he should probably get 'first-fruits," "thank-offerings," and heaven knows what, besides the annual guinea! A few months after the bequest he called, and to his surprise found the metamorphosed man would not give him a farthing. No representations of the astonished visitor could make the slightest impression. At last he said, "Why, Mr. -, you always used to be most liberal, and I cannot account for your present mood at all. I thought that having, as I hear, come in for a considerable legacy, you would probably have doubled your subscription." "That," said the unhappy man, "is the very reason why I can give you nothing. While I was in the receipt merely of my salary, I could save nothing. But now that I have a larger sum, which I am not compelled to touch, and which will go on accumulating, every little I can add to it will tell." And from this he could not be beaten off. It is a very instructive anecdote, and might almost make one pray-only that it is, in most cases, so very superfluous-that no wealthy friend may mention us in his will, lest he should be unwittingly consigning to us the poisoned robe of Nessus! At length comes a letter of gossip, that "savoury" food, which, like Isaac's venison, every lady "loveth." I have at last, at your request, been down to our native village, and traversed the "old scenes ;" nay, old no longer; for had I been transported to some spot in your India, or woke up like Rip Van Winkle after a thirty years' sleep, I could hardly have been more bewildered. You talk of the "dear familiar spots so bright in memory;" but I fancy you would hardly recognise them if you saw them. As to your request that I would send you a sketch or two, it is out of the question; any chance picture in a book of travels, of some new "Troy" or "Jericho " rising in the far west, would be quite as like. If, then, as you say, the transcripts in your memory are vivid and bright, be pleased to keep them so, for that is all you are likely to get. You speak as if everything in "Old England" were exempt from the law of change; as if its houses were fossil remains, its men and women petrifactions (a good many of them may be); its scenery stereotyped. Now, my dear, I want to tell you, that we are passing through a great social revolution which will change the face of this country more in the next fifty than it has been in the last three hundred years. It is hard to say what remote villages the huge network of our railways, when completed, will not embrace; what towns the diversion of traffic may not leave, like stranded vessels, high and dry on the beach, to rot-no more to be touched by the refluent tide; or what obscure hamlets may not be turned into busy marts of a new created commerce. Our native hamlet is just going through the process of decomposition; whether it will ever be reconstructed into something better I know not. The great railway, of which you have heard, between London and Birmingham, and which is expected to be opened through its entire length next summer, passes straight by Berkhampstead,-sweet Cowper's birthplace, and steers through that little homestead a few miles beyond, which is the birthplace of our less celebrated selves. It cuts the quaint garden in two, and has parted for ever the old house, which still stands in ricketty desolation, from the summer-house, which is tottering in still greater decrepitude on the other side of a huge embankment along which the railway passes. So there is an end of your dreams of my tasting once more the fruit of the ancient mulberrytree, and of my sending you a honeysuckle, or rose or two, from the fragrant wreaths which used to mantle the porch. But I can send you a few cinders that have dropped from one of the "puffing monsters" that roar and rush in triumph through this scene of desolation, if that will be any solace to you. But I forget; you can have no conception of these monsters. Well, then, imagine that sons and daughters of Gorgon and Briareus, Gog and Magog, have intermarried for some generations, and that a railway locomotive is a promising scion of the family. Just at the end of the little meadow, and by the copse where we used to watch the setting sun, is an interesting collection of staring red brick workmen's cottages,-back to back in admirable uniformity, with a little interval of cabbage-garden between. them, and displaying a charming vista (but not so pervious to the sun as the old foliage), of sheets, gowns, and petticoats flaunting in the breeze. At the end of the row, of course, there is a public house with an ambitious sign of the "Railway Tavern," whence I smelt fumes as I passed very unlike the scent of jessamine, and heard strains not much like those of your piano, my love, though they recalled it. From thence I wandered over the four fields into the village, which, though greatly metamorphosed, and bearing certain equivocal marks of "progress" and "civilisation" in the shape of three beer shops and one little methodist chapel, was not so changed as to be beyond recognition. (another oc - The little green pool by Farmer Bloomfield's, cupant now dwells there, and has done so these fifteen years), was as verdant as ever; and in it were dabbling some geese that might, for aught I know, have been lineal descendants of those that furnished forth our Michaelmas dinner thirty years ago; but who shall say? It is certain they made much the same noise, and looked uncommonly like. I thence strolled to the little squab church and its quiet churchyard, which, except that the last looked rather more populous with silent inhabitants than in days of yore, seemed nearly unaltered. The well-remembered grassy mounds in the corner remain untouched, and the loved ones beneath still slumber peacefully there. It is a good thing the great railway did not require to pass through the churchyard, or, sure as fate, the monster would have done so without ceremony or compunction, and hustled the poor skeletons to the right and left in premature resurrection. I spent some time in the churchyard spelling out the names of some of the old inhabitants of our early days, and beholding, with pleased surprise, from the (as usual) truthful epitaphs, that many of them were garnished and decorated with virtues of which, while they lived, I had not had the smallest suspicion; so artfully had Christian humility concealed their excellences! Superstition no longer deifies the dead, but affection angelises them. For my part, I think if I were bedaubed and bedizened with one of the tawdry epitaphs I have sometimes seen in a country churchyard, it would be enough to make me get up in the night and scratch it out. There was our old acquaintance, farmer Veesey's fat wife, who resembled (as some one said of her like), "a fillet of veal upon castors," decked out in a suit of virtues which might not have misbecome a seraph. Several others of our old acquaintances I found were such wives, mothers, neighbours, friends; so charitable, gentle, forgiving! Surely the parson in our time must have had an easy time of it, an absolute sinecure with such a flock. It is really odd to see so much wickedness above ground, and so much goodness under it. Ah! if they could but change places, what a pleasant world it would be! Or rather, perhaps we ought to say, "Who can wonder that so much iniquity is left among the living, when such cartloads of all the cardinal and other virtues are thus yearly shovelled into the earth by the undertaker?" Any way, however, it is a pleasant thing to find our old friends improved by keeping; and looking better in their winding-sheets than ever they did in silks or satins. As I had a fine autumn day before me, I made across the country by Berkhampstead and Boxmoor to Church End, and the common beyond, where I passed so many "bitter-sweet," happymiserable hours in my first school days, and recognised the very spot where, on a fine May evening, sprawling on the green sward, while my companions were at play at a little distance, I had, at eight or nine years of age, my first notion of—"Love," you will say, like a woman as you are. Pooh! my dear; pray do not put such thoughts into a child's head; no, I was no more thinking of love than you, under the blazing sun of India, are thinking of a Christmas dinner of roast beef and plum pudding. I was thinking of something very different and of much more importance; it was then that I had, if you must know, my first notion of the "Infinite." 66 There," you will say, "that will do; pray do not trouble me with any of the metaphysical stuff of which you used to be so fond." But, begging your pardon, madam, it will not do, for I consider the phenomenon a rather striking one. "And pray, then, what were your thoughts?" I imagine my deeply interested sister to ask. "Ah! it is imagination," you reply, "for I feel no curiosity in the matter." I can hear you, my dear, at this distance, right across the equator, as plain as if you were at my elbow. You are not at all interested, you protest, in any such philosophic gibberish. Well, then I will be brief. As I lay sprawling on my back, day-dreaming as I too often used to do, and do still, I saw the stars come gleaming out in the deep azure, one after another, and I said to myself: "Suppose I could fly up to that bright star; looking at one relatively near; that is, not more than a few billions of millions of miles or so from me."What if I could fly up there?" I thought within myself again. "Well, what then? Suppose I could get to the little faint spark beyond that. Well, what then? And then to the fainter, paler, twinkling light beyond; still, what then? Should I here come to the end of the-Goodness gracious !-end of what? If there is any thing to end the world, it must be still something which ends it, therefore there cannot be any end;" and so, at all events, ended the catechism; and the notion dawned upon me that there was and must be an Infinite, and that "Space" was one of its |