imitating cameos, working frills, up to the severest manly studies, mathematics, and the classics. I never saw any one so universally accomplished. Music, though she played well on many instruments, was perhaps the least striking of her acquirements; drawing and languages the most so. Her English especially was enchanting; you could just distinguish her from a native by an originality, a raciness, a floating grace, like that which pervades the letters of Mrs. Klopstock. Oh! what a charming creature she was! How thoroughly free from vanity and self-conceit! her industry was astonishing: she used to apologise for it sometimes, as I sate by her side doing nothing. "Really," she would say, "she could not help it!"-as if her diligence had been a fault, and my idleness a virtue. The dear, dear Sophia! parting from her was my first sorrow.

Last on our roll of foreigners, came two French girls: one of them merely a fair specimen of her pleasant nation-sprightly, goodhumoured, amusing, and plain: the other a person of some note in this chronicle, being and it is saying much-beyond all manner of competition the greatest dunce in the school. Zenobie de M had lost both her parents in the Revolution, and was under the care of an aunt, splendidly married, and living in London, in the very first world. She was a fine, striking, fashionable-looking girl, in the French style of beauty; rather large-boned, angular and high-shouldered; but so light, erect, and agile, that the very defects of her figure seemed graces. Her face, though that too told her country, was pretty, in spite of a wide mouth and a cocked-up nose: pretty from its sparkling expression-all smiles, and blushes, and animation: so were her manners. We had not a more agreeable and intelligent girl in the house; how she could contrive to be a dunce I cannot imagine-but a dunce she was, in the most comprehensive sense of that illomened word. She could not spell two syllables in any language, could scarcely write her name, could not cast up three figures, could not construe the simplest sentence, could not read the notes in music, never could, and never did, learn the catechism. This seems incredible on recollection, and it seemed more so at the moment. Nothing but a school could have brought the fact fully out; and even with the proofs hourly before our eyes, we could not help thinking sometimes that we must have done her injustice. Her ingenuity in evading the pains and penalties of duncicalness was very great. She had a dexterous way of excusing any error in speech, by pleading her English education for a French fault, or her French birth for a mistake in English;

so that she claimed to speak both languages with the allowance of a foreigner. She spoke them, as she played the piano, entirely by ear, with great elegance, but incorrectly. In all sports, or light accomplishments, she was unrivalled. Skipping-ropes and battledores, and tambourines, and castanets, in her graceful hands, were her own delight, and the delight of all beholders. But the triumph of triumphs for Zenobie was dancing-day; to see her, and her countryman the dancing-master-he teaching, and she executing, such pirouettes and entrechats as none but French heels could achieve-both looking down with a very visible contempt on “ English awkwardness with two left legs." Those Mondays and Wednesdays must pretty well have compensated for the mortifications of the rest of the week; and she needed some compensation: for, with all the splendour of her home, and the elegance of her appearance, it was evident that she was neglected. The mother's heart and the mother's eye were wanting; you might tell that she was an orphan. She abounded in trinkets and nicknacks, and fashionable frippery; but no comforts, no indulgences, no garden-bonnet, no warm pelisse, no cakes or fruit, no shillings or half-crowns, no consideration for her gentlewomanly spirit! I never shall forget the generous pleasure with which she shared half a dozen oranges-the rare present of some titled friend-between those, who from happier circumstances had been enabled to be kind to her. Oh! she was very desolate, very forlorn! How often, when we were going home for the holidays, with smiling mothers and fathers, so impatient that they would scarcely allow time for an adieu, I have seen her black eyes full of tears as she anticipated the hours, or days, or weeks, that she must wait till an insolent waiting-maid should have leisure or will to remember her. Poor Zenobie! she left us suddenly to return to Paris with her aunt. The last time I heard of her she was a celebrated beauty at the court of Napoleon. I don't know what has become of her since the change of dynasty, but I hope she is about the court still-it is just what she is fit for; she was made for feathers and long trains, and smiling, and graciousness, and dancing, and small-talk; she ought to be at court; a court life would so become her; and she would become it like a diamond necklace, polished and glittering and precious alike from the fashion and the material. I hope she is still at court.

We are now fairly at the end of our foreign list. There are two or three more British worthies for whom we must find a niche in another place, along with our English teacher and our authorised play.

WALKS IN THE COUNTRY.

THE WOOD.

APRIL 20th.-Spring is actually come now, with the fulness and almost the suddenness of a northern summer. To-day is completely April;-clouds and sunshine, wind and showers; blossoms on the trees, grass in the fields, swallows by the ponds, snakes in the hedgerows, nightingales in the thickets, and cuckoos every where. My young friend Ellen G. is going with me this evening to gather wood sorrel. She never saw that most elegant plant, and is so delicate an artist that the introduction will be a mutual benefit; Ellen will gain a subject worthy of her pencil, and the pretty weed will live-no small favour to a flower, almost as transitory as the gum cistus; duration is the only charm which it wants, and that Ellen will give it. The weather is, to be sure, a little threatening, but we are not people to mind the weather when we have an object in view; we shall certainly go in quest of the wood-sorrel, and will take May, provided we can escape May's follower; for, since the adventure of the lamb, Saladin has had an affair with a gander, furious in defence of his goslings, in which rencontre the gander came off conqueror; and as geese abound in the wood to which we are going (called by the country people the Pinge,) and the victory may not always incline to the right side, I should be very sorry to lead the Soldan to fight his battles over again. We will take nobody but May.

So saying, we proceeded on our way through winding lanes, between hedge-rows tenderly green, till we reached the hatch-gate, with the white cottage beside it embosomed in fruittrees, which forms the entrance to the Pinge, and in a moment the whole scene was before our eyes.

barked beech, every twig swelling with the brown buds, and yet not quite stripped of the tawny foliage of Autumn; tall hollies and hawthorn beneath, with their crisp brilliant leaves mixed with the white blossoms of the sloe, and woven together with garlands of woodbines and wild briars;-what a fairy land!

Primroses, cowslips, pansies, and the regular open-eyed white blossom of the wood anemone (or to use the more elegant Hampshire name, the windflower) were set under our feet as thick as daisies in a meadow; but the pretty weed we came to seek was coyer; and Ellen began to fear that we had mistaken the place or the season.-At last she had her self the pleasure of finding it under a brake of holly-"Oh look! look! I am sure that this is the wood-sorrel! Look at the pendent white flower, shaped like a snow-drop and veined with purple streaks, and the beautiful trefoil leaves folded like a heart,—some, the young ones, so vividly yet tenderly green that the foliage of the elm and the hawthorn would show dully at their side,-others of a deeper tint, and lined, as it were, with a rich and changeful purple!-Don't you see them?" pursued my dear young friend, who is a delightful piece of life and sunshine, and was half inclined to scold me for the calmness with which, amused by her enthusiasm, I stood listening to her ardent exclamations"Don't you see them? Oh how beautiful! and in what quantity! what profusion! See how the dark shade of the holly sets off the light and delicate colouring of the flower!And see that other bed of them springing from the rich moss in the roots of that old beech tree! Pray let us gather some. are baskets." So quickly and carefully we began gathering, leaves, blossoms, roots and all, for the plant is so fragile that it will not brook separation!-quickly and carefully we gathered, encountering divers petty misfor tunes in spite of all our care, now caught by the veil in a holly bush, now hitching our shawls in a bramble, still gathering on, in spite of scratched fingers, till we had nearly filled our baskets and began to talk of our departure:

Here

What a piece of fairy land! The tall elms overhead just bursting into tender vivid leaf, with here and there a hoary oak or a silver

"No! as I live, a a hedgehog! Look, Ellen, how it has coiled itself into a thorny ball! Off with it May! Don't bring it to me!". And May, somewhat reluctant to part with her prickly prize, however troublesome of carriage, whose change of shape seemed to me to have puzzled her sagacity more than any

event I ever witnessed, for in general she has perfectly the air of understanding all that is going forward-May at last dropt the hedgehog; continuing however to pat it with her delicate cat-like paw, cautiously and daintily applied, and caught back suddenly and rapidly after every touch, as if her poor captive had been a red-hot coal. Finding that these pats entirely failed in solving the riddle, (for the hedgehog shammed dead, like the lamb the other day, and appeared entirely motionless), she gave him so spirited a nudge with her pretty black nose, that she not only turned him over, but sent him rolling some little way along the turfy path,-an operation which that sagacious quadruped endured with the most perfect passiveness, the most admirable non-resistance. No wonder that May's discerument was at fault: I myself, if I had not been aware of the trick, should have said that the ugly rough thing which she was trundling along, like a bowl or a cricket-ball, was an inanimate substance, something devoid of sensation and of will. At last my poor pet thoroughly perplexed and tired out, fairly relinquished the contest, and came slowly away, turning back once or twice to look at the object of her curiosity, as if half inclined to return and try the event of another shove. The sudden flight of a wood-pigeon effectually diverted her attention; and Ellen amused herself by fancying how the hedgehog was scuttling away, till our notice was also attracted by a very different object.

We had nearly threaded the wood, and were approaching an open grove of magnificent oaks on the other side, when sounds other than of nightingales burst on our ear, the deep and frequent strokes of the woodman's axe, and emerging from the Pinge we discover the havoc which that axe had committed. About twenty of the finest trees lay stretched on the velvet turf. There they lay in every shape and form of devastation: some, bare trunks stripped ready for the timber carriage, with the bark built up in long piles at the side; some with the spoilers busy about them, stripping, hacking, hewing; others with their noble branches, their brown and fragrant shoots all fresh as if they were alive-majestic corses, the slain of to-day! The grove was like a field of battle. The young lads who were stripping the bark, the very children who were picking up the chips, seemed awed and silent, as if conscious that death was around them. The nightingales sang faintly and interruptedly-a few low frightened notes like a requiem.

Ah! here we are at the very scene of murder, the very tree that they are felling; they have just bewn round the trunk with those slaughtering axes, and are about to saw it nder. After all it is a fine and thrilling operation, as the work of death usually is. Into how grand an attitude was that young

man thrown as he gave the final stroke round the root; and how wonderful is the effect of that supple and apparently powerless saw, bending like a riband, and yet overmastering that giant of the woods, conquering and overthrowing that thing of life! Now it has passed half through the trunk, and the woodman has begun to calculate which way the tree will fall; he drives a wedge to direct its course;

now a few more movements of the noiseless saw; and then a larger wedge. See how the branches tremble! Hark how the trunk begins to crack? Another stroke of the huge hammer on the wedge, and the tree quivers, as with a mortal agony, shakes, reels, and falls. How slow and solemn and awful it is! How like to death, to human death in its grandest form! Cæsar in the Capitol, Seneca in the bath, could not fall more sublimely than that oak.

Even the heavens seem to sympathise with the devastation. The clouds have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapoury as the smoke which overhangs London; the setting sun just gleaming underneath with a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays spreading upwards with a lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and dusky glow, like the light reflected on the sky from some vast conflagration. The deep flush fades away, and the rain begins to descend; and we hurry homeward rapidly yet sadly, forgetful alike of the flowers, the hedgehog, and the wetting, thinking and talking only of the fallen tree.

THE VICAR'S MAID.

village, the little hamlet of Aberleigh, receivABOUT three years ago, our neighbouring ed one of the greatest blessings which can befall a country parish, in the shape of an active, pious, and benevolent Vicar. Chaucer shall describe him for me, for I prefer the real words of the old poet, to the more elaborate and ornamented version of Dryden :

"A good man ther was of religioun

That was a poure parsone of a toun;
But riche he was of holy thought, and werk;
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde prech;
His parishens devoutly wolde he teche;
Benigne he was and wonder diligent
And in adversite ful patient;

And swiche he was yproved often sithes
Ful loth were him to cursen for his tithes,
But rather wolde he geven out of doute
Unto his poure parishens aboute

Of his offring, and eke of his substance;
He coude in litel thing have suffisance.
Wide was his parish, and houses fer asonder,
But he ne left nought for no rain ne thonder
In sikeness and in mischief to visite
The fenest in his parish moche, and lite
Upon his fete, and in his hand a staff:
This noble ensample to his shepe he yaf,

or the still wilder donkies, whom we used to meet in the recesses of the wood, and whose picturesque forms and grouping, added the interest of life and motion to the landscape.

All the family became denizens of Aberleigh wood, except Mary, who continued a perfect Nereide, constant to the coast to a degree that rendered her quite unjust to our inland scenery. She languished under the reverse disease of a Calenture, pined for the water, and was literally, in a new sense of the word, sea-sick. To solace her malady, she would sometimes walk across the park to the Loddon, especially at sun-set; for to hear Mary, any one would have thought that that bright luminary never did make a set worth talking of, except when he could look at himself in a watery mirror; and then, when she reached the Loddon, provoked at the insufficiency of the spectacle, she would turn back without vouchsafing a second glance, although it is but justice to that poetical river to deelare, that at Aberleigh bridge it is as broad, as glassy, and as beautiful a stream as ever the sun showed his face in, with much of the character of a lake; but Ullswater, or Winandermere, would have fared equally ill with Mary; nothing but the salt sea could content

ber.

It was soon obvious that our inland beaux were no better suited to her taste than our inland scenery. Half the young men in the village offered her suit and service. First, George Ellis the farrier, a comely youth, and well to do in the world, who kept an apprentice, and a journeyman, a horse and cart, two greyhounds, three spaniels, and one pointer, being indeed, by many degrees, the keenest sportsman in these parts;-George Ellis proffered to make her mistress of himself, his household, his equipage, and his stud; but was civilly rejected. The next candidate who presented himself was Ben Appleton, the son of a neighbouring farmer; Ben Appleton is a wag, and has a face and figure proper to the vocation: a shape tall, stout, and square, that looks stiff and is active; with a prodigious power of putting himself into all manner of out-of-the-way attitudes, and of varying and sastaining this pantomime to an extent that really seems inexhaustible. The manner in which he can, so to say, transpose that sturdy form of his, put his legs where his arms should he, and his arms in the place of his legs, walk on his hands, stand on his head, tumble, hop, and roll, might raise some envy in Grimaldi himself. His features are under the same command. Originally I suspect him to have been good-looking; but who can ever say that he has seen Ben Appleton's real face? He has such a roll of the eye, such a twist of the tone, such a power of drawing to either ear that broad mouth, filled with strong white teeth. His very talk is more like a piece of laugh, than the speech of an ordinary man;

and his actions have all the same tendencyfull of fun, with a dash of mischief. But Ben is a privileged person, an universal favourite; and Mary, never dreaming of such a catastrophe as his falling in love, used to contemplate his tricks from afar, with something of the same amusement which she might have felt in watching a kitten or a monkey. For a long time he made his addresses with impunity; unsuspected and unrepelled; no one believed him in earnest. At last, however, Ben and his case became serious, and then Mary became serious too: he received a firm though gentle dismissal, and looked grave for a whole week. Next came Aaron Keep the shoemaker, the wisest man in the parish, noted all over the country for his knowledge of the. stars, and judgment in the weather, and almost as notorious for his aversion to matrimony and his contempt for women. Aaron was said to have been jilted in his youth, which soured a kindly temper and put mistrust into his heart. Him, even him, did Mary's beauty and Mary's modesty vanquish. He who had been abusing the sex for the last forty years actually made her an offer. I suppose the happiest moment in his life must have been that in which she refused him. One can fancy him trembling over the narrowness of his escape, like the man who did not fall over Dover Cliff-but the offer was made.

The cause of all this obduracy at last appeared. A young sailor arrived at the vicarage, whom the most graphical of our poets shall assist me in describing:

"Fresh were his features, his attire was new;
Clean was his linen, and his jacket blue;
Of finest jean his trowsers, tight and trim,
Brushed the large buckle at the silver rim."
CRABBE.

He arrived at the vicarage towards the end of winter, and was introduced by Mary to mine hostess of the Eight Bells as her half-brother; although Mary was so little used to telling fibs, that her blushes, and downcast looks and smiles between, in short, the whole pervading consciousness would have betrayed her, as Mrs. Jones, the landlady, observed, to any one who had but half an eye; to say nothing of Miss Clara's arch look as she passed them. Never was half-brother so welcomed; and in good truth he was well worthy of his welcome.

Thomas Clere was an exceedingly fine young man, of six or seven and twenty, with a head of curly black hair, a sun-burnt complexion, a merry, open countenance, and a bluff hearty voice that always sounded as if transmitted through a speaking-trumpet. He established himself at the Eight Bells, and soon became very popular in that respectable hostelry. Besides his good humour, his liberality, and his sea jokes, next to Irish jokes always the most delightful to rustic ears, perhaps because next to Irish, the least intelligi