knight held back from the tourney! a soldier numberless inconsistencies of which he stood from the battle! The poor swain was incon- accused. He was in love over head and ears, solable. At last, one who is always ready to but the nymph was cruel. She said no, and do a good-natured action, great or little, set no, and no, and poor Brown three times rejectforth to back his petition; and, by dint of ap-ed, at last resolved to leave the place, partly pealing to the public spirit of our worthy neigh-in despair, and partly in that hope which often bour, and the state of the barometer, talking mingles strangely with a lover's despair, the alternately of the parish honour and thunder showers, of lost matches and sopped hay, he carried his point, and returned triumphantly with the delighted Joel. In the mean time we became sensible of another defalcation. On calling over our roll, Brown was missing; and the spy of the preceding night, Charles Grover,—the universal scout and messenger of the village, a man who will run half-a-dozen miles for a pint of beer, who does errands for the very love of the trade, who, if he had been a lord, would have been an ambassador-was instantly despatched to summon the truant. His report spread general consternation. Brown had set off at four o'clock in the morning to play in a cricketmatch at M., a little town twelve miles off, which had been his last residence. Here was desertion! Here was treachery against that goodly state, our parish! To send James Brown to Coventry was the immediate resolution; but even that seemed too light a punishment for such delinquency. Then how we cried him down! At ten, on Sunday-night, (for the rascal had actually practised with us, and never said a word of his intended disloyalty,) he was our faithful mate, and the best player (take him for all in all) of the eleven. At ten in the morning he had run away, and we were well rid of him; he was no batter compared with William Grey or Tom Coper; not fit to wipe the shoes of Samuel Long, as a bowler; nothing of a scout to John Simmons; the boy David Willis was worth fifty of him "I trust we have within our realm was the universal sentiment. So we took tall John Strong, who, with an incurable hankering after the honour of being admitted, had kept constantly with the players, to take the chance of some such accident-we took John for our pisaller. I never saw any one prouder than the good-humoured lad was of this not very flattering piece of preferment. John Strong was elected, and Brown sent to Coventry; and when I first heard of his delinquency, I thought the punishment only too mild for the crime. But I have since learned the secret history of the offence; (if we could know the secret histories of all offences, how much better the world would seem than it does now!) and really my wrath is much abated. It was a piece of gallantry, of devotion to the sex, or rather a chivalrous obedience to one chosen fair. I must tell my readers the story. Mary Allen, the prettiest girl of M., had it seems revenged upon our blacksmith the hope that when he was gone he should be missed. He came home to his brother's accordingly; but for five weeks he heard nothing from or of the inexorable Mary, and was glad to beguile his own "vexing thoughts," by endeavouring to create in his mind an artificial and factitious interest in our cricket-matchall unimportant as such a trifle must have seemed to a man in love. Poor James, however, is a social and warm-hearted person, not likely to resist a contagious sympathy. As the time for the play advanced, the interest which he had at first affected became genuine and sincere: and he was really, when he left the ground on Sunday night, almost as enthusiastically absorbed in the event of the next day as Joel Brent himself. He little foresaw the new and delightful interest which awaited him at home, where, on the moment of his arrival, his sister-in-law and confidante, presented him with a billet from the lady of his heart. It had, with the usual delay of letters sent by private hands, in that rank of life, loitered on the road in a degree inconceivable to those who are accustomed to the punctual speed of the post, and had taken ten days for its twelve-miles' journey. Have my readers any wish to see this billet-doux? I can show them (but in strict confidence) a literal copy. It was addressed, "For mistur jem browne blaxmith by "S." Was there ever a prettier relenting? a summons more flattering, more delicate, more irresistible? The precious epistle was undated; but having ascertained who brought it, and found, by cross-examining the messenger, that the Monday in question was the very next day, we were not surprised to find that Mistur browne forgot his engagement to us, forgot all but Mary and Mary's letter, and set off at four o'clock the next morning to walk twelve miles, and play for her parish and in her sight. Really we must not send James Browne to Coventry-must we? Though if, as his sister-in-law tells our damsel Harriet he hopes to do, he should bring the fair Mary home as his bride, he will not greatly care how little we say to him. But he must not be sent to Coventry-True-love forbid! At last we were all assembled, and marched down to H. common, the appointed ground, which, though in our dominions according to the map, was the constant practising place of our opponents, and terra incognita to us. We found our adversaries on the ground as we expected, for our various delays had hindered us from taking the field so early as we wished; and, as soon as we had settled all preliminaries, the match began. gether with a very complete somerset of Ben Appleton, our long-stop, who floundered about in the mud, making faces and attitudes as laughable as Grimaldi, none could tell whether by accident or design, were the chief incidents of the scene of action. Amongst the spectators nothing remarkable occurred, beyond the general calamity of two or three drenchings, except that a form, placed by the side of a hedge, under a very insufficient shelter, was faced shyness, that he could scarcely hold his bat, and was bowled out, without a stroke, from actual nervousness. "He will come off that," Tom Coper says.-I am afraid he will. I wonder whether Tom had ever any modesty to lose. Our other modest lad, John Strong, did very well; his length told in fielding, and he got good fame. Joel Brent, the rescued mower, got into a scrape, and out of it again;|| his fortune for the day. He ran out his mate, But, alas! I have been so long settling my Samuel Long; who, I do believe, but for the preliminaries that I have left myself no room excess of Joel's eagerness, would have staid for the detail of our victory, and must squeeze in till this time, by which exploit he got into the account of our grand achievements into as sad disgrace; and then he himself got thirtylittle compass as Cowley, when he crammed seven runs, which redeemed his reputation. the names of eleven of his mistresses into the William Grey made a hit which actually lost narrow space of four eight-syllable lines. the cricket-ball. We think she lodged in a They began the warfare-these boastful men hedge, a quarter of a mile off, but nobody of B. And what think you, gentle reader, could find her. And George Simmons had was the amount of their innings? These nearly lost his shoe, which he tossed away in challengers-the famous eleven-how many a passion, for having been caught out, owing did they get? Think! imagine! guess! to the ball glancing against it. These, toYou cannot!-Well!-they got twenty-two, or rather they got twenty; for two of theirs were short notches, and would never have been allowed, only that, seeing what they were made of, we and our umpires were not particular. They should have had twenty more, if they had chosen to claim them. Oh, how well we fielded! and how well we bowled! our good play had quite as much to do with their miserable failure as their bad. Samuel Long is a slow bowler, George Sim-knocked into the ditch, in a sudden rush of mons a fast one, and the change from Long's the cricketers to escape a pelting shower, by lobbing, to Simmons's fast balls posed them which means all parties shared the fate of Ben completely. Poor simpletons! they were al- Appleton, some on land and some by water; ways wrong, expecting the slow for the quick, and that, amidst the scramble, a saucy gipsey and the quick for the slow. Well, we went of a girl contrived to steal from the knee of in. And what were our innings? Guess the demure and well-appareled Samuel Long, again!-guess! A hundred and sixty-nine! a smart handkerchief, which his careful dame in spite of soaking showers, and wretched ground, where the ball would not run a yard, we headed them by a hundred and forty-seven; and then they gave in, as well they might. William Grey pressed them much to try another innings. "There was so much chance," as he courteously observed, "in cricket, that advantageous as our position seemed, we might, very possibly, be overtaken. The B. men had better try." But they were beaten sulky, and would not move-to my great disappointment; I wanted to prolong the pleasure of success. What a glorious sensation it is to be for five hours together winning-winning-winning! always feeling what a whist[player feels when he takes up four honours, seven trumps! Who would think that a little hit of leather, and two pieces of wood, had such a delightful and delighting power? had tied around it, to preserve his new (what is the mincing feminine word ?) his new inexpressibles; thus reversing the story of Desdemona, and causing the new Othello to call aloud for his handkerchief, to the great diversion of the company. And so we parted; the players retired to their supper, and we to our homes; all wet through, all good humoured, and all happy-except the losers. To-day we are happy too. Hats, with ribands in them, go glancing up and down; and William Grey says, with a proud humility, "We do not challenge any parish; but, if we be challenged, we are ready." TOM CORDERY. The only drawback on my enjoyment, was the failure of the pretty boy, David Willis, THERE are certain things and persons that who injudiciously put in first, and playing for look as if they could never die: things of such the first time in a match among men and vigour and hardiness, that they seem constistrangers, who talked to him, and stared at tuted for an interminable duration, a sort of bia, was seized with such a fit of shame-immortality. An old pollard oak of my ac quaintance used to give me this impression. | mon, as may be said to prevail between reNever was tree so gnarled, so knotted, so full of crooked life. Garlanded with ivy and woodbine, almost bending under the weight of its own rich leaves and acorns, tough, vigorous, lusty, concentrating as it were the very spirit of vitality in its own curtailed proportions, could that tree ever die? I have asked myself twenty times, as I stood looking on the deep water over which it hung, and in which it seemed to live again-would that strong dwarf ever fall? Alas! the question is answered. Walking by the spot to-day-this very daythere it lay prostrate; the ivy still clinging about it, the twigs swelling with sap, and putting forth already the early buds. There it lay a victim to the taste and skill of some admirer of British woods, who with the tact of Ugo Foscolo (that prince of amateurs) has discovered in the knots and gnarls of the exterior coat the leopard-like beauty which is concealed within the trunk. There it lies, a type of sylvan instability, fallen like an emperor. Another piece of strong nature in a human form used to convey to me exactly the same feeling-and he is gone too! Tom Cordery is dead. The bell is tolling for him at this very moment. Tom Cordery dead! the words seem almost a contradiction. One is tempted to send for the sexton and the undertaker, to undig the grave, to force open the coffin-lid-there must be some mistake. But, alas! it is too true; the typhus fever, that axe which levels the strong as the weak, has hewed him down at a blow. Poor Tom Cordery! puted thieves and the myrmidons of justice in the neighbourhood of Bow-street. Indeed his especial crony, the head-keeper, used sometimes to hint, when Tom, elevated by ale, had provoked him by overcrowing, "that a stump was no bad shield, and that to shoot off a hand and a bit of an arm for a blind, would be nothing to so daring a chap as Tom Cordery." This conjecture, never broached till the keeper was warm with wrath and liquor, and Tom fairly out of hearing, seemed always to me a little super-subtle; but it is certain that Tom's new professions did bear rather a suspicious analogy to the old, and the ferrets, and terriers, and mongrels by whom he was surrounded, did really look," as the worthy keeper observed, "fitter to find Christian hares and pheasants, than rats and such vermin." So in good truth did Tom himself. Never did any human being look more like that sort of sportsman commonly called a poacher. He was a tall, finely-built man, with a prodigious stride, that cleared the ground like a horse, and a power of continuing his slow and steady speed, that seemed nothing less than miraculous. Neither man, nor horse, nor dog, could out-tire him. He had a bold, undaunted presence, and an evident strength and power of bone and muscle. You might see by looking at him, that he did not know what fear meant. In his youth he had fought more battles than any man in the forest. He was as if born without nerves, totally insensible to the recoils and disgusts of humanity. I have known him This human oak grew on the wild North-of- take up a huge adder, cut off its head, and then Hampshire country, of which I have before deposit the living and writhing body in his made honourable mention; a country of heath, brimless hat, and walk with it coiling and and hill, and forest, partly reclaimed, enclosed, wreathing about his head, like another Medusa, and planted by some of the greater proprietors, till the sport of the day was over, and he carbut for the most part uncultivated and uncivil-ried it home to secure the fat. With all this ized; a proper refuge for wild animals of every species. Of these the most notable was my friend Tom Cordery, who presented in his own person no unfit emblem of the district in which he lived the gentlest of savages, the wildest of civilized men. He was by calling ratcatcher, hare-finder, and broom-maker; a triad of trades which he had substituted for the one grand profession of poaching, which he followed in his younger days with unrivalled talent and success, and would, undoubtedly, have pursued till his death, had not the bursting of an overloaded gun unluckily shot off his left hand. As it was, he still contrived to mingle a little of his old unlawful occupation with his honest callings; was a reference of high authority amongst the young aspirants, an adviser of undoubted honour and secresysuspected, and more than suspected, as being one "who, though he played no more, o'erlooked the cards." Yet he kept to windward of the law, and indeed contrived to be on such terms of social and even friendly intercourse with the guardians of the game on M. Com iron stubbornness of nature, he was of a most mild and gentle demeanour, had a fine placidity of countenance, and a quick blue eye beaming with good-humour. His face was sunburnt into one general pale vermilion hue that overspread all his features; his very hair was sunburnt too. His costume was generally a smockfrock of no doubtful complexion, dirt-coloured, which hung round him in tatters like fringe, rather augmenting than diminishing the freedom, and, if I may so say, the gallantry of his bearing. This frock was furnished with a huge inside pocket, in which to deposit the game killed by his patrons-for of his three employments, that which consisted of finding hares for the great farmers and small gentry, who were wont to course on the common, was by far the most profitable and most pleasing to him, and to them. Every body liked Tom Cordery. He had himself an aptness to like, which is certain to be repaid in kind-the very dogs knew him, and loved him, and would beat for him almost as soon as for their master. Even May, the most sagacious of greyhounds, ten to Tom sohoing as to old Tray giving tongue. appreciated his talents, and would as soon lis- | miserable moor! Flat, marshy, dingy, bare. Here that piece of green treachery, a bog; there parched, and pared, and shrivelled, and black with smoke and ashes; utterly desolate and wretched every where, except where amidst the desolation blossomed, as in mock Nor was his conversation less agreeable to the other part of the company. Servants and masters were equally desirous to secure Tom. Besides his general and professional familiar-ery, the enamelled gentianella. No hares ity with beasts and birds, their ways and doings, a knowledge so minute and accurate, that it might have put to shame many a professed naturalist, he had no small acquaintance with the goings-on of that unfeathered biped eatled man; in short, he was, next after Lucy, who recognized his rivalry by hating, decrying, and undervaluing him, by far the best newsgatherer of the country side. His news he of course picked up on the civilized side of the parish, (there is no gossiping in the forest,) partly at that well-frequented inn the Red Lion, of which Tom was a regular and noted supporter-partly amongst his several employers, and partly by his own sagacity. In the matter of marriages, (pairings he was wont to call them.) he relied chiefly on his own skill in noting certain preliminary indications; and certainly for a guesser by profession and a very bid one, he was astonishingly often right. At the alehouse especially, he was of the first authority. An air of mild importance, a diplomatic reserve on some points, great smoothness of speech, and that gentleness which is so often the result of conscious power, made him there an absolute ruler. Perhaps the effect of these causes might be a little aided by the latent dread which that power inspired in others. Many an exploit had proved that Tom Cordery's one arm was fairly worth any two on the common. The pommelling of Bob Arlott, and the levelling of Jem Serle to the earth by one swing of a huge old hare, (which unusual weapon was by the way the first-slain of Mayflower, on its way home to us in that walking eupboard, his pocket, when the unlucky rencontre with Jem Serle broke two heads, the dead and the living,) arguments such as these might have some cogency at the Red Lion. But he managed every body, as your gentlemannered person is apt to do. Even the rude squires and rough farmers, his temporary masters, he managed, particularly as far as concerned the beat, and was sure to bring them found to his own peculiar fancies and prejudees, however strongly their own wishes might turn them aside from the direction indicated, and however often Tom's sagacity in that instance might have been found at fault. Two spots in the large wild enclosures into which the heath had been divided were his especial favourites; the Hundred Acres, alias the Poor Allotment, alias the Burnt Common (Do any or all of these titles convey any pation of the real destination of that manytoned place? a piece of moor-land portioned eat to serve for fuel to the poor of the parish) this was one. Oh the barrenness of this ever came there; they had too much taste. Tom was not, however, without that strong sense of natural beauty which they who live amongst the wildnesses and fastnesses of nature so often exhibit. One spot, where the common trenches on the civilized world, was scarcely less his admiration than mine. It is a high hill, half covered with furze and heath, and broom, and sinking abruptly down to a large pond, almost a lake, covered with wild water-fowl. The ground, richly clothed with wood, oak and beech and elm, rises on the other side with equal abruptness, as if shutting in those glassy waters from all but the sky, which shines so brightly in their clear bosom: just in the bottom peeps a small sheltered farm, whose wreaths of light smoke and the white glancing wings of the wildducks, as they flit across the lake, are all that give token of motion or of life. I have stood there in utter oblivion of greyhound or of hare, till moments have swelled to minutes, and minutes to hours; and so has Tom, conveying by his exclamations of delight at its "pleasantness," exactly the same feeling which a poet or a painter (for it breathes the very spirit of calm and sunshiny beauty that a master-painter loves) would express by different but not truer praise. He called his own home "pleasant" too; and there, though one loves to hear any home so called-there, I must confess, that favourite phrase, which I like almost as well as they who have no other, did seem rather misapplied. And yet it was finely placed, very finely. It stood in a sort of defile, where a road almost perpendicular wound from the top of a steep abrupt hill, crowned with a tuft of old Scottish firs, into a dingle of fern and wild brushwood. A shallow, sullen stream oozed from the bank on one side, and, after forming a rude channel across the road, sank into a dark, deep pool, half hidden among the sallows. Behind these sallows, in a nook between them and the hill, rose the uncouth and shapeless cottage of Tom Cordery. It is a scene which hangs upon the eye and the memory, striking, grand, almost sublime, and above all eminently foreign. No English painter would choose such a subject for an English landscape; no one in a picture would take it for English. It might pass for one of those scenes which have furnished models to Salvator Rosa. Tom's cottage was, however, very thoroughly national and characteristic; a low, ruinous hovel, the door of which was fastened with a sedulous attention to security, that contrasted strangely with the tattered thatch of the roof, and the half-broken windows. No garden, no pigsty, no pens for geese, none of the usual signs of cottage habitation:-yet the house was covered with nondescript dwellings, and the very walls were animated with their extraordinary tenants; pheasants, partridges, rabbits, tame wild ducks, half-tame hares, and their enemies by nature and education, the ferrets, terriers, and mongrels of whom his retinue consisted. Great ingenuity had been evinced in keeping separate these jarring elements; and by dint of hutches, cages, fences, kennels and half a dozen little hurdled enclosures, resembling the sort of courts which children are apt to build round their card-houses, peace was in general tolerably well preserved. Frequent sounds, however, of fear or anger, as their several instincts were aroused, gave token that it was but a forced and hollow. truce, and at such times the clamour was prodigious. Tom had the remarkable tenderness for animals when domesticated, which is so often found in those whose sole vocation seems to be their destruction in the field; and the one long, straggling, unceiled, barn-like room, which served for kitchen, bed-chamber, and hall, was cumbered with bipeds and quadrupeds of all kinds and descriptions-the sick, the delicate, the newlycaught, the lying in. In the midst of this menagerie sate Tom's wife, (for he was married, though without a family-married to a woman lame of a leg as he himself was minus an arm,) now trying to quiet her noisy inmates, now to outscold them. How long his friend the keeper would have continued to wink at this den of live game, none can say ; the roof fairly fell in during the deep snow of last winter, killing, as poor Tom observed, two as fine litters of rabbits as ever were kittened. Remotely, I have no doubt that he himself fell a sacrifice to this misadventure. The overseer, to whom he applied to reinstate his beloved habitation, decided that the walls would never bear another roof, and removed him and his wife, as an especial favour, to a tidy, snug, comfortable room in the workhouse. The workhouse! From that, poor Tom visibly altered. He lost his hilarity and independence. It was a change such as he had himself often inflicted, a complete change of habits, a transition from the wild to the tame. No labour was demanded of him; he went about as before, finding hares, killing rats, selling brooms, but the spirit of the man was departed. He talked of the quiet of his old abode, and the noise of the new; complained of children and other bad company; and looked down on his neighbours with the sort of contempt with which a cock pheasant might regard a barn-door fowl. Most of all did he, braced into a gipsy-like defiance of wet and cold, grumble at the warmth and dryness of his apartment. He used to foretell that it would kill him, and assuredly it did so. Never could the typhus fever have found out that wild hill side, or have lurked under that broken roof. The free touch of the air would have chased the demon. Alas, poor Tom! warmth and snugness, and comfort, whole windows, and an entire ceiling, were the death of him. Alas, poor Tom! AN OLD BACHELOR. THERE is no effect of the subtle operation of the association of ideas more universal and more curious than the manner in which the most trivial circumstances recall particular persons to our memory. Sometimes these glances of recollection are purely pleasurable. Thus I have a double liking for a May-day, as being the birth-day of a dear friend whose fair idea bursts upon me with the first sunbeam of that glad morning; and I can never |