est of the family, but she, poor child! never made her appearance. She was her father's favourite, and probably begged off; and they had by this time discovered at the Hall, that their young lasses had been used to too much freedom to find the air of Chapel Street agree with them. The only one we ever saw again was Miss Jemima, who, having refused a rich baronet, a good deal older than herself, for no better reason than not liking him, was sent to her aunt's on a visit of penitence; a sort of house of correction-an honourable banishment. I believe in my heart that the fair culprit would have preferred the Tread-Mill or Botany Bay, had she her choice; but there was no appeal from the lettre de cachet which had consigned her to Mrs. Patience's care and admonitions, so she took refuge in a dumb resentment. I never saw any one so inveterately sullen in my life. One whole week she remained in this condition, abiding, as best she might, her aunt's never-ending lectures, and the intolerable ennui of the house, during a foggy November. The next, the rejected lover arrived at the door, and was admitted; and before she had been three weeks in Chapel Street, Sir Thomas escorted her home as his intended bride. They were right in their calculations; rather than have passed the winter with Mrs. Patience, the fair Jemima would have married her grandfather. Another niece now made her appearance, who, from circumstances and situation, seemed peculiarly fitted for the permanent companion and heiress-the orphan daughter of a younger brother, lately deceased, who had left this only child but slenderly provided for. Miss Patience (for she was her aunt's namesake) was a young woman of two-and-twenty, brought up in a remote parsonage, without the advantage of any female to direct her education, and considerably more unformed and unpolished than one is accustomed to see a young lady in this accomplished age. She was a good deal like her aunt in person-far more than comported with beauty-large-boned and red-haired, and looking at least ten years older than she really was. Ten years older, too, she was in disposition; staid, sober, thoughtful, discreet; would no more have read a novel or flirted with an apothecary, than Mrs. Patience herself. Aunt and niece seemed made for each other. But somehow they did not do together. One does not quite know why-perhaps because they were too much alike. They were both great managers; but Miss Patience had been used to a lower range of household cares, and tormented mistress and servants by unnecessary savings and superfluous honesty. Then she was too useful; would make the tea, would snuff the candles, would keep the keys; affronted the housekeeper by offering to make the pastry, and the butler by taking under her care the argand lamp; which last exploit was unsuccessful enough-a lamp being a sort of machine that never will submit to female direction; a woman might as well attempt to manage a steam engine. The luminary in question was particularly refractory. It had four burners, which never, for the three nights which she continued in office, were all in action together. Some sent forth long tongues of flame, like those which issue from the crater of a volcano, giving token of the crash that was to follow; some popped outright, without warning; and some again languished, and died away, leaving behind them a most unsavoury odour. At last the restive lamp was abandoned to the butler, and light restored to the drawing-room; and had Miss Patience taken a lesson from this misadventure, all might have gone well. But Miss Patience was not of a temperament to profit by her own errors. She went on from bad to worse; disobliged Flora by plunging her in the wash-tub, to the great improvement of her complexion; made an eternal enemy of Daphne, by a fruitless attempt to silence her most noisy tongue; and, finally, lectured Mrs. Patience herself for scolding about nothing. In short, she was a reformer, honest, zealous, uncompromising, and indiscreet, as ever wore petticoats. She had in her head the beau ideal of a perfect domestic government, and would be satisfied with nothing less. She could not let well alone. So that she had not been a month in that well-ordered and orderly house, before her exertions had thrown every thing into complete disorder; the servants were in rebellion, the furniture topsy-turvy; and the lady, who found herself likely to be in a situation of that dynasty of French kings who reigned under a maire du palais, in a very justifiable passion. This rightful anger, was, however, more moderately expressed than had usually happened with Mrs. Patience's causeless indignation. The aunt remonstrated, indeed, and threatened; but the niece would not stay. She was as unbending as an oak-tree; rejected all compromise; spurned at all concession; abjured all rich relations; and returned to board at a farm-house in her old neighbourhood. After this contumacy, her name was never heard in Chapel Street; and for some time the post of companion remained vacant. At length Mrs. Patience began to break, visibly and rapidly, as the very healthy often do, affording so affecting a contrast with their former strength. In her the decline was merely bodily; neither the mind nor the temper had undergone any change; but her increasing feebleness induced her medical attendants to recommend that some one should be provided to sit with her constantly; and as she protested vehemently against any farther trial of nieces, the object was sought through the medium of an advertisement, and appeared to be completely attained when it produced Miss Steele. How Miss Steele should have failed to please, still astonishes me. Pliant, soothing, cheerful, mild, with a wonderful command of countenance and of temper, a smiling aspect, a soft voice, a perpetual habit of assentation, and such a power over the very brute beasts, that Flora would get up to meet her, and Daphne would wag her tail at her approach-a compliment which that illustrious pug never paid before to woEvery heart in Chapel Street did Miss Steele win, except the invulnerable heart of Mrs. Patience. She felt the falseness. The honey cloyed; and before two months were over, Miss Steele had followed the nieces. man. After this her decline was rapid, and her latter days much tormented by legacy-hunters. A spendthrift nephew besieged her in a morning-a miserly cousin came to lose his sixpences to her at backgammon of an afternoon -a subtle attorney and an oily physician had each an eye to her hoards, if only in the form of an executorship; and her old butler, and still older housekeeper, already rich by their savings in her service, married, that they might share together the expected spoil. She died, and disappointed them all. Three wills were found. In the first, she divided her whole fortune between Flora and Daphne, and their offspring, under the direction of six trustees. In the second, she made the County-hospital her heir. In the third, the legal and effectual will, after formally disinheriting the rest of her relations, she bequeathed her whole estate, real and personal, to her honest niece Patience Wither, as a reward for her independence. And never was property better bestowed; for Patience the Second added all that was wanting to the will of Patience the First; supplied every legacy of charity and of kindness; provided for the old servants and the old pets, and had sufficient left to secure her own comfort with a man as upright and as downright as herself. They are the most English couple of my acquaintance, and the happiest. Long may they continue so! And all this happiness is owing to the natural right-mindedness and sturdy perception of character of my cross godmamma. THE MOLE-CATCHER. THERE are no more delightful or unfailing associations than those afforded by the various operations of the husbandman, and the changes on the fair face of nature. We all know that busy troops of reapers come with the yellow corn; whilst the yellow leaf brings a no less busy train of ploughmen and seedsmen preparing the ground for fresh harvests; that woodbines and wild roses, flaunting in the blossomy hedge-rows, give token of the gay bands of haymakers which enliven the meadows; and that the primroses, which begin to unfold their pale stars by the side of the green lanes, bear marks of the slow and weary female processions, the gangs of tired yet talkative bean-setters, who defile twice a day through the intricate mazes of our cross-country roads. These are general associations, as well known and as universally recognized as the union of mince-pies and Christmas. I have one, more private and peculiar, one, perhaps, the more strongly impressed on my mind, because the impression may be almost confined to myself. The full flush of violets which, about the middle of March, seldom fails to perfume the whole earth, always brings to my recollection one solitary and silent coadjutor of the husbandman's labours, as unlike a violet as possible-Isaac Bint, the mole-catcher. I used to meet him every spring, when we lived at our old house, whose park-like paddock, with its finely-clumped oaks and elms, and its richly-timbered hedge-rows, edging into wild, rude, and solemn fir-plantations, dark, and rough, and hoary, formed for so many years my constant and favourite walk. Here, especially under the great horse-chestnut, and where the bank rose high and naked above the lane, crowned only with a tuft of golden broom; here the sweetest and prettiest of wild flowers, whose very name hath a charm, grew like a carpet under one's feet, enamelling the young green grass with their white and purple blossoms, and loading the air with their delicious fragrance; here I used to come almost every morning, during the violet-tide: and here almost every morning I was sure to meet Isaac Bint. His I think that he fixed himself the more firmly in my memory by his singular discrepancy with the beauty and cheerfulness of the scenery and the season. Isaac is a tall, lean, gloomy personage, with whom the clock of life seems to stand still. He has looked sixtyfive for these last twenty years, although his dark hair and beard, and firm manly stride, almost contradict the evidence of his sunken cheeks and deeply-lined forehead. The stride is awful: he hath the stalk of a ghost. whole air and demeanour savour of one that comes from under-ground. His appearance is "of the earth, earthy." His clothes, hands, and face, are of the colour of the mould in which he delves. The little round traps which hang behind him over one shoulder, as well as the strings of dead moles which embellish the other, are encrusted with dirt like a tomb-stone; and the staff which he plunges into the little hillocks, by which he traces the course of his small quarry, returns a hollow sound, as if tapping on the lid of a coffin. Images of the church-yard come, one does not know how, with his presence. Indeed he does officiate as assistant to the sexton in his capacity of grave-digger, chosen, as it should the owner be solitary, his demesne is suffiseem, from a natural fitness; a fine sense of ciently populous. A long row of bee-hives congruity in good Joseph Reed, the function- extends along the warmest side of the garden ary in question, who felt, without knowing-for Isaac's honey is celebrated far and near; why, that, of all men in the parish, Isaac a pig occupies a commodious sty, at one corBint was best fitted to that solemn office. ner; and large flocks of ducks and geese (for His remarkable gift of silence adds much which the Penge, whose glades are intersected to the impression produced by his remarkable by water, is famous) are generally waiting figure. I don't think that I ever heard him round a back gate leading to a spacious shed, speak three words in my life. An approach far larger than Isaac's own cottage, which of that bony hand to that earthy leather cap serves for their feeding and roosting-place. was the greatest effort of courtesy that my The great tameness of all these creaturesdaily salutations could extort from him. For for the ducks and geese flutter round him the this silence, Isaac has reasons good. He moment he approaches, and the very pig folhath a reputation to support. His words are lows him like a dog-gives no equivocal testoo precious to be wasted. Our mole-catcher, timony of the kindness of our mole-catcher's ragged as he looks, is the wise man of the nature. A circumstance of recent occurrence village, the oracle of the village-inn, foresees puts his humanity beyond doubt. the weather, charms away agues, tells fortunes by the stars, and writes notes upon the almanac-turning and twisting about the predictions after a fashion so ingenious, that it is a moot point which is oftenest wrong-Isaac Bint, or Francis Moore. In one eminent instance, our friend was, however, eminently right. He had the good luck to prophesy, before sundry witnesses-some of them sober -in the tap-room of the Bell-he then sitting, pipe in mouth, on the settle at the right-hand side of the fire, whilst Jacob Frost occupied the left; he had the good fortune to foretell, on New Year's Day 1812, the downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte a piece of soothsayership which has established his reputation, and dumfounded all doubters and cavillers ever since; but which would certainly have been more striking if he had not annually uttered the same prediction, from the same place, from the time the aforesaid Napoleon became first consul. But the small circumstance is entirely overlooked by Isaac and his admirers, and they believe in him, and he believes in the stars, more firmly than ever. Our mole-catcher is, as might be conjectored, an old bachelor. Your married man hath more of this world about him-is less, so to say, planet-struck. A thorough old bachelor is Isaac, a contemner and maligner of the sex, a complete and decided womanhater. Female frailty is the only subject on which he bath ever been known to dilate; he will not even charm away their agues, or tell their fortunes, and, indeed, holds them to be unworthy the notice of the stars. No woman contaminates his household. He lives on the edge of a pretty bit of woodland scenery, called the Penge, in a snug cottage of two rooms, of his own building, surrounded by a garden cribbed from the waste, well fenced with quickset, and well stocked with fruit trees, herbs, and flowers. One large apple-tree extends over the roof-a pretty bit of colour when in blossom, contrasted with the thatch of the little dwelling, and relieved by the dark wood behind. Although Amongst the probable causes of Isaac's dislike to women, may be reckoned the fact of his living in a female neighbourhood (for the Penge is almost peopled with duck-rearers and goose-crammers of the duck and goose gender) and being himself exceedingly unpopular amongst the fair poultry-feeders of that watery vicinity. He beat them at their own weapons; produced at Midsummer geese fit for Michaelmas; and raised ducks so precocious, that the gardeners complained of them as forerunning their vegetable accompaniments; and "panting peas toiled after them in vain." In short the Naïads of the Penge had the mortification to find themselves driven out of B market by an interloper, and that interloper a man, who had no right to possess any skill in an accomplishment so exclusively feminine as duck-rearing; and being no ways inferior in another female accomplishment, called scolding, to their sister-nymphs of Billingsgate, they set up a clamour and a cackle which might rival the din of their own gooseries at feeding-time, and would inevitably have frightened from the field any competitor less impenetrable than our hero. But Isaac is not a man to shrink from so small an evil as female objurgation. He stalked through it all in mute disdainlooking now at his mole-traps, and now at the stars-pretending not to hear, and very probably not hearing. At first this scorn, more provoking than any retort, only excited his enemies to fresh attacks; but one cannot be always answering another person's silence. The flame which had blazed so fiercely, at last burnt itself out, and peace reigned once more in the green alleys of Penge-wood. One, however, of his adversaries—his nearest neighbour-still remained unsilenced. Margery Grover was a very old and poor woman, whom age and disease had bent almost to the earth; shaken by palsy, pinched by penury, and soured by misfortune-a moving bundle of misery and rags. Two centuries ago she would have been burnt for a witch; now she starved and grumbled on the parish allowance; trying to eke out a scanty subsistence on the dubious profits gained by the produce of two geese and a lame gander, once the unmolested tenants of a greenish pool, situate right between her dwelling and Isaac's, but whose watery dominion had been invaded by his flourishing colony. but those who know the careful ways to which necessity trains cottage children, would deem credible; and Margery, a woman of strong passions, strong prejudices, and strong affections, who had lived in and for the desolate boy, felt the approach of death embittered by the certainty that the work-house, always the scene of her dread and loathing, would be the only refuge for the poor orphan. Death, however, came on visibly and rapidly; and she sent for the overseer to beseech him to put Harry to board in some decent cottage; she could not die in peace until he had promised; the fear of the innocent child's being contaminated by wicked boys and godless women preyed upon her soul; she implored, she conjured. The overseer, a kind but timid man, hesitated, and was beginning a puzzled speech about the bench and the vestry, when another voice was heard from the door of the cottage. This was the cause of feud; and although Isaac would willingly, from a mingled sense of justice and of pity, have yielded the point to the poor old creature, especially as ponds are there almost as plentiful as blackberries, yet it was not so easy to control the habits and inclinations of their feathered subjects, who all perversely fancied that particular pool; and various accidents and skirmishes occurred, in which the ill-fed and weak birds of Margery had generally the worst of the fray. One of her early goslings was drowned-an accident which may happen even to water-fowl; and her lame gander, a sort of pet with the poor old woman, injured in his well leg; and Mar- "Margery," said our friend Isaac, "will gery vented curses as bitter as those of Sycorax: you trust Harry to me? I am a poor man, to and Isaac, certainly the most superstitious be sure; but between earning and saving, personage in the parish-the most thorough there'll be enough for me and little Harry. believer in his own gifts and predictions-"T is as good a boy as ever lived, and I'll try was fain to nail a horse-shoe on his door for to keep him so. Trust him to me, and I'll be the defence of his property, and to wear one a father to him. I can't say more." of his own ague charms about his neck for his personal protection. "God bless thee, Isaac Bint! God bless thee!" was all poor Margery could reply. They were the last words she ever spoke. And little Harry is living with our good molecatcher, and is growing plump and rosy; and Margery's other pet, the lame gander, lives and thrives with them too. Poor old Margery! A hard winter came; and the feeble, tottering creature shook in the frosty air like an aspen-leaf; and the hovel in which she dwelt-for nothing could prevail on her to try the shelter of the work-houseshook like herself at every blast. She was not quite alone either in the world or in her poor hut: husband, children, and grandchildren had passed away; but one young and innocent being, a great-grandson, the last of her de- MADEMOISELLE THERESE. scendants, remaining a helpless dependant on one almost as helpless as himself. ONE of the prettiest dwellings in our neighLittle Harry Grover was a shrunken, stunted bourhood, is the Lime Cottage at Burleyboy, of five years old; tattered and squalid, Hatch. It consists of a small low-browed like his grandame, and, at first sight, presented habitation, so entirely covered with jessamine, almost as miserable a specimen of childhood, honeysuckle, passion-flowers, and china-roses, as Margery herself did of age. There was as to resemble a bower, and is placed in the even a likeness between them; although the centre of a large garden,- turf and flowers fierce blue eye of Margery had in the boy a before, vegetables and fruit trees behind, mild appealing look, which entirely changed backed by a superb orchard, and surrounded the whole expression of the countenance. A by a quickset hedge, so thick, and close, and gentle and peaceful boy was Harry, and, above regular, as to form an impregnable defence to all, a useful. It was wonderful how many the territory which it encloses-a thorny ramears of corn in the autumn, and sticks in the winter, his little hands could pick up! how well he could make a fire, and boil the kettle, and sweep the hearth, and cram the goslings! Never was a handier boy or a trustier; and when the united effects of cold, and age and rheumatism confined poor Margery to her poor bed, the child continued to perform his accustomed offices; fetching the money from the vestry, buying the loaf at the baker's, keep ing house, and nursing the sick woman, with a kindness and thoughtfulness, which none part, a living and growing chevaux-de-frise. On either side of the next gravel-walk, which leads from the outer gate to the door of the cottage, stand the large and beautiful trees to which it owes its name; spreading their strong, broad shadow over the turf beneath, and sending, on a summer afternoon, their rich, spicy fragrance half across the irregular village green, dappled with wood and water, and gay with sheep, cattle, and children, which divides them, at the distance of a quarter of a mile, from the little hamlet of Burley, its venerable church and handsome rectory, and its short straggling street of cottages, and country shops. Such is the habitation of Thérèse de G., an emigrée of distinction, whose aunt having married an English officer, was luckily able to afford her niece an asylum during the horTors of the Revolution, and to secure to her a small annuity, and the Lime Cottage after her death. There she has lived for these five-andthirty years, gradually losing sight of her few and distant foreign connexions, and finding all her happiness in her pleasant home and her kind neighbours-a standing lesson of cheerfulness and contentment. A very popular person is Mademoiselle Thérèse-popular both with high and low; for the prejudice which the country people almost universally entertain against foreigners, vanished directly before the charm of her manners, the gaiety of her heart, and the sunshine of a temper that never knows a cloud. She is so kind to them too, so liberal of the produce of her orchard and garden, so full of resource in their difficulties, and so sure to afford sympathy if she have nothing else to give, that the poor all idolize Mademoiselle. Among the rich, she is equally beloved. No party is complete without the pleasant Frenchwoman, whose amenity and cheerfulness, her perfect, general politeness, her attention to the old, the poor, the stupid and the neglected, are felt to be invaluable in society. Her conversation is not very powerful either, nor very brilliant; she never says any thing remarkable-but then it is so good-natured, so genuine, so unpretending, so constantly up and alive, that one would feel its absence more than that of a more showy and ambitions talker; to say nothing of the charm which it derives from her language, which is alternately the most graceful and purest French, and the most diverting and absurd broken English; a dialect in which, whilst contriving to make herself perfectly understood both by gentle and simple, she does also contrive, in the course of an hour, to commit more blanders, than al' the other foreigners in England make in a month. Her appearance betrays her country almost as much as her speech. She is a Frenchlooking little personage, with a slight, active figure, exceedingly nimble and alert in every movement; a round and darkly-complexioned face, somewhat faded and passée, but still striking from the laughing eyes, the bland and brilliant smile, and the great mobility of expression. Her features, pretty as they are, want the repose of an English countenance; and her air, gesture, and dress, are decidedly foreign, all alike deficient in the English charm of quietness. Nevertheless, in her youth, she must have been pretty so pretty that some of our young ladies scandalized at the idea of finding their favourite an old maid, have invented sundry legends to excuse the solecism, and talk of duels fought pour l'amour de ses beaux yeux, and of a betrothed lover guillotined in the Revolution. And the thing may have been so; although one meets everywhere with old maids who have been pretty, and whose lovers have not been guillotined; and although Mademoiselle Thérèse has not, to do her justice, the least in the world the air of a heroine crossed in love. The thing may be so; but I doubt it much. I rather suspect our fair Demoiselle of having been in her youth a little of a flirt. Even during her residence at Burley-Hatch, hath not she indulged in divers very distant, very discreet, very decorous, but still very evident flirtations? Did not Doctor Abdy, the portly, ruddy schoolmaster of B., dangle after her for three mortal years, holidays excepted? And did she not refuse him at last? And Mr. Foreclose, the thin, withered, wrinkled city solicitor, a man, so to say, smoke-dried, who comes down every year to Burley for the air, did not he do suit and service to her during four long vacations, with the same il success? Was not Sir Thomas himself a little smitten? Nay, even now, does not the good Major, a halting veteran of seventy-but really it is too bad to tell tales out of the parish-all that is certain is, that Mademoiselle Thérèse might have changed her name long before now, had she so chosen ; and that it is most probable that she will never change it at all. Her household consists of her little maid Betsy, a cherry-cheeked, blue-eyed country lass, brought up by herself, who, with a full clumsy figure, and a fair, innocent, unmeaning countenance, copies, as close as these obstacles will permit, the looks and gestures of her alert and vivacious mistress, and has even caught her broken English; - of a fat lapdog, called Fido, silky, sleepy, and sedate; and of a beautiful white Spanish ass, called Donnabella, an animal docile and spirited, far beyond the generality of that despised race, who draws her little donkey-chaise half the country over, runs to her the moment she sees her, and eats roses, bread and apples from her hand; but who, accustomed to be fed and groomed, harnessed and driven only by females, resists and rebels the moment she is approached by the rougher sex; has overturned more boys, and kicked more men, than any donkey in the kingdom; and has acquired such a character for restiveness among the grooms in the neighbourhood, that when Mademoiselle Thérèse goes out to dinner, Betsy is fain to go with her to drive Donnabella home again, and to return to fetch her mistress in the evening. If every body is delighted to receive this most welcome visiter, so is every body delighted to accept her graceful invitations, and meet to eat strawberries at Burley-Hatch. Oh, how pleasant are those summer after |