Imagine the feelings of four persons who had never met before in such a situation-especially of the two ladies. Mrs. Ellis, dinner over, with the consciousness of the half bottle of port and the quarter of sherry, the apples, the nuts, the single pair of mould candles, her drawing-room fire that could not be lighted, her dinner to provide as well as to cook, and her own dark merino and black silk apron! Poor Mrs. Coningsby, on the other hand, seeing at a glance how the case stood, feeling for the trouble that they were giving, and sinking under a consciousness far worse to bear than Mrs. Ellis's-the consciousness of being overdressed,-how heartily did she wish herself at home again! or, if that were too much to desire, what would she have given to have replaced her claret-coloured satin gown, her hat Iwith its white plumes, her pearls and her rubies, back again in their wardrobes and cases. It was a trial of no ordinary nature to the good sense, good breeding, and good humour of both parties; and each stood it well. There happened to be a cold round of beef in the house, some undressed game, and plenty of milk and eggs; the next farmer had killed a pig; and with pork chops, cold beef, a pheasant, and apple fritters, all very nicely prepared, more fastidious persons than Mr. and Mrs. Coningsby might have made a good dinner. The host brought out his best claret; the pretty hostess regained her smiles, and forget her black apron and her dark merino; and, what was a far more difficult achievement, the fair visiter forgot her plumes and her satin. The evening, which began so inauspiciously, ended pleasantly and sociably; and, when the note (taken, as was guessed, by our hero from the letter-boy, with the intention of sending it by a groom) was found quietly ensconced in his waistcoat pocket, Mrs. Coningsby could hardly regret the termination of her present adventure, although fully resolved never again to incur a similar danger.

Of his mishaps when attending his duty in parliament, and left in some measure to his own guidance, (for, having no house in town, his family only go for about three months in the season,) there is no end. Some are serious, and some very much the reverse. Take a specimen of his London scrapes.

Our excellent friend wears a wig, made to imitate a natural head of hair, which it is to be presumed that at the best of times it does not very closely resemble, and which after a week of Mr. Coningsby's wearing put on with

the characteristic negligence of his habits sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other,always awry, and frequently hindside before, -assumes such a demeanour as never was equalled by Christian peruke at any time or in any country.

One day last winter, being in London without a servant, he by some extraordinary chance happened to look in the glass when he was į dressing, and became aware of the evil state of his caxon;-a piece of information for which he had been generally indebted to one of his two guardians, Mrs. Coningshy or the old butler; and, recollecting that he was engaged to a great dinner-party the ensuing, evening, stepped into the first hairdresser's shop that he passed to bespeak himself a wig;| where being a man of exceedingly pleasant and jocular manners, (your oddities, with the exception of the peculiar oddity, are commonly agreeable persons,) he passed himself off for a bachelor to the artificer of hair, and declared that his reason for desiring a wig of peculiar beauty and becomingness was that he was engaged to a great party the next day, at which he expected to meet the lady of his heart, and that his fate and fortune depended on the set of his curls. This he impressed very strongly on the mind of the perruquier, who, an enthesiast in his art, as a great artist should be, saw nothing extraordinary in the fact of a man's happiness hanging on the cut of his wig, and gravely promised that no exertion should be wanting on his part to contribute to the felicity of his customer, and that the article in question, as perfect as hands could make it, should be at his lodgings the next evening at seven.

Punctual to the hour arrived the maker of perukes; and, finding Mr. Coningsby not yet returned to dress, went to attend another appointment, promising to come back in half an hour. In half an hour accordingly the mas of curls reappeared-just in time to see a cab riolet driving rapidly from the door, at which a maid-servant stood tittering.

"Where is Mr. Coningsby ?" inquired the| perruquier.

"Just gone out to dinner," replied the girl; "and a queer figure he is, sure enough. He looks, for all the world, like an owl in an ivybush?"

"To be sure, he has not got his new wig on -my wig!" returned the alarmed artist. "He never can be such a fool as that!"

"He's fool enough for anything in the war of forgetting or not attending, although a main clever man in other respects," responded our friend Sally; "and he has got a mop of hair on his head, whoever made it, that would have served for half a dozen wigs."

"The article was sent home untrimmed, jos as it was woven," replied the unfortunate fab ricator, in increasing consternation; and a capital article it is. I came by his own direction to cut and curl it, according to the shape

of his face; the gentleman being particular about the set of it, because he's going a-courting."

"Going a-courting?" exclaimed Sally, amazed in her turn; "the Lord ha' mercy upon the poor wretch! If he has not clean forgot that he's married, and is going to commit big-big -bigotry, or bigoly-I don't know what you call it-to have two wives at once! and then he'll be hanged. Going a-courting! What'll Madam say! He'll come to be hanged, sure enough!"

Married already!" quoth the perruquier, with a knowing whistle, and a countenance that spoke "Benedick, the married man,' in every feature. "Whew! One wife at a time's enough for most people. But he'll not be hanged. The fact of his wearing my wig with the hair six inches long will save him. He must be non compos. And you that stand tittering there can be little better to let him go out in such a plight. Why did'nt you stop him?"

"Stop him!" ejaculated the damsel,-" stop Mr. Coningsby! I should like to know how !" Why, by telling him what he was about to be sure, and getting him to look in the glass. Nobody with eyes in his head could have gone out such a figure!"

"Talk to him!" quoth Sally; "but how was I to get him to listen? And, as to looking in the glass, I question if ever he did such a thing in his life. You don't know our Mr. Coningsby, that's clear enough!" "I only wish he had never come in my way, that I never had had the ill luck to have known him!" rejoined the discomfited artist. "If he should happen to mention my name as his wigmaker whilst he has that peruke on his head, I am ruined!-my reputation is gone for ever!"

"No fear of that!" replied Sally, in a comforting tone, struck with compassion at the genuine alarm of the unlucky man of wigs. There's not the slightest danger of his mentioning your name, because you may be certain sure that he does not remember it. Lord love you! he very often forgets his own. Don't you be frightened about that!" repeated the damsel soothingly, as she shut the door, whilst the discomfited perruquier returned to his shop, and Mr. Coningsby, never guessing how entirely in outward semblance he resembled the wild man of the woods, proceeded to his dinner-party, where his coiffure was, as the hair

dresser had predicted, the theme of universal astonishment and admiration.*

This, however, was one of the least of his scrapes. He has gone to court without a sword; has worn coloured clothes to a funeral, and black to a wedding. There is scarcely any conventional law of society which, in some way or other, he hath not contrived to break; and, in two or three slight instances, he has approached more nearly than beseems a magistrate and a senator to a dêmêlé with the laws of the land. He hath quietly knocked down a great fellow, for instance, whom he caught beating a little one, and hath once or twice been so blind, or so absent, as to suffer a petty culprit to run away, when brought up for examination, in virtue of his own warrant. But it is remarkable that he never, in his most oblivious moods, is betrayed into an unkind word or an ungenerous action. There is a moral instinct about him which preserves him, in the midst of his oddities, pure and unsullied in thought and deed. With all his "distractions," he never lost a friend or made an enemy; his opponents at an election are posed when they have to get up a handbill against him; and for that great test of amiableness, the love of his family, his household, his relations, servants, and neighbours, I would match my worthy friend, George Coningsby, against any man in the county.

*Strange things are wigs on-it's a wonder that any man who has the good luck to be bald should condescend to wear one-and still stranger are they off, particularly when a large number are gathered together. The first grand collection that ever I happened to see was, a great many years ago, at Mr. Basil Montagu's, where Dr. Parr, who made a London home of that most agreeable house, did me the honour to introduce me to a long row of his own most orthodoxlooking caxons, (everybody remembers the epithet borrowed from his peculiar peruke, "Parr's buzz prose," in the poetry of the Antijacobin),-a long row hung upon wine-bottles, each of which was dignified by some high-sounding title. One, I remember, he called the Grand Seignior, and another the Emperor of Morocco,-full-bottoms all of them, fit cushions for the three-cornered clerical hat. The last assortment that was brought under my notice consisted of some twenty or thirty lank-haired and puritanical-looking periwigs, arranged in due order on a long table in the Victoria Theatre, and destined to adorn the pates of the roundheads in my tragedy of Charles the first. Grave as the occasion was, and nothing can be more serious than the first night of a new play to manager laughing at the profound solemnity of their appearand author, neither Mr. Abbott nor I could help ance. The only person who did not laugh was the hairdresser. He had a respect for his art.

COUNTRY LODGINGS.

BETWEEN two and three years ago, the following pithy advertisement appeared in several of the London papers :—

"Country Lodgings.-Apartments to let in a large farm-house, situate in a cheap and pleasant village, about forty miles from London. Apply (if by letter post-paid) to A. B., No. 7, Salisbury-street, Strand."

Little did I think, whilst admiring in the broad page of the Morning Chronicle the compendious brevity of this announcement, that the pleasant village referred to was our own dear Aberleigh; and that the first tenant of those apartments should be a lady whose family I had long known, and in whose fortunes and destiny I took a more than common interest!

Upton Court was a manor-house of considerable extent, which had in former times been the residence of a distinguished Catholic family, but which, in the changes of property incident to our fluctuating neighbourhood, was now "fallen from its high estate," and degraded into the homestead of a farm so small, that the tenant, a yeoman of the poorest class, was fain to eke out his rent by entering into an agreement with a speculating Belford upholsterer, and letting off a part of the fine old mansion in the shape of furnished lodgings.

Nothing could be finer than the situation of Upton, placed on the summit of a steep acclivity, looking over a rich and fertile valley to a range of woody hills; nothing more beautiful than the approach from Belford, the road leading across a common between a double row of noble oaks, the ground on one side sinking with the abruptness of a north-country burn, whilst a clear spring, bursting from the hill side, made its way to the bottom between patches of shaggy underwood and a grove of smaller trees; a vine-covered cottage just peeping between the foliage, and the picturesque outline of the Court, with its oldfashioned porch, its long windows, and its tall, clustered chimneys towering in the distance. It was the prettiest prospect in all Aberleigh.

The house itself retained strong marks of former stateliness, especially in one projecting wing, too remote from the yard to be devoted to the domestic purposes of the farmer's family. The fine proportions of the lofty and spacious apartments, the rich mouldings of

the ceilings, the carved chimney-pieces, and the panelled walls, all attested the former grandeur of the mansion; whilst the fragments of stained glass in the windows of the great gallery, the half-effaced coats of arms over the door-way, the faded family portraits, grim black-visaged knights, and pale shadowy ladies, or the reliques of mouldering tapestry that fluttered against the walls, and, above all, the secret chamber constructed for the priest's hiding-place in days of Protestant persecution, for in darker ages neither of the dominant churches was free from that foul stain,—each of these vestiges of the manners and the history of times long gone by appealed to the imagination, and conspired to give a Mrs. Radcliffe-like, Castle-of-Udolpho-sort of romance to the manor-house. Really, when the wind swept through the overgrown espaliers of that neglected but luxuriant wilderness, the terraced garden; when the screech-owl shrieked from the ivy which clustered up one side of the walls, and "rats and mice, and such small deer," were playing their pranks behind the wainscot, it would have formed as pretty a locality for a supernatural adventure, as ever decayed hunting lodge in the recesses of the Hartz, or ruined fortress on the castled Rhine. Nothing was wanting but the ghost, and a ghost of any taste would have been proud of such a habitation.

Less like a ghost than the inhabitant who did arrive, no human being well could be.

Mrs. Cameron was a young widow. Her father, a Scotch officer, well-born, sickly, and poor, had been but too happy to bestow the hand of his only child upon an old friend and fellow-countryman, the principal clerk in a government office, whose respectable station, easy fortune, excellent sense, and super-excellent character, were, as he thought, and as fathers, right or wrong, are apt to think, advantages more than sufficient to counterbalance a disparity of years and appearance, which some daughters might have thought startling,

the bride being a beautiful girl of seventeen, the bridegroom a plain man of seven-andfifty. In this case, at least, the father was right. He lived long enough to see that the young wife was unusually attached to her kind and indulgent husband, and died, about a twelve-month after the marriage, with the fallest confidence in her respectability and happiness. Mr. Cameron did not long survive him. Before she was nineteen the fair Helen Came

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ron was a widow and an orphan, with one beautiful boy, to whom she was left sole personal guardian, an income being secured to her ample for her rank in life, but clogged with the one condition of her not marrying again.

Such was the tenant, who, wearied of her dull suburban home, a red brick house in the middle of a row of red brick houses; tired of the loneliness which never presses so much upon the spirits as when left solitary in the environs of a great city; pining for country liberty, for green trees, and fresh air; much caught by the picturesqueness of Upton, and its mixture of old-fashioned stateliness and village rusticity; and, perhaps, a little swayed by a desire to be near an old friend and correspondent of the mother, to whose memory she was so strongly attached, came in the budding spring time, the showery, flowery month of April, to spend the ensuing summer at the Court.

We, on our part, regarded her arrival with no common interest. To me it seemed but yesterday since I had received an epistle of thanks for a present of one of dear Mary Howitt's charming children's books, -an epistle undoubtedly not indited by the writer, -in huge round text, between double pencil lines, with certain small errors of orthography corrected in a smaller hand above; followed in due time by postscripts to her mother's letters, upon one single line, and the spelling much amended; then by a short, very short note, in French; and at last, by a despatch of unquestionable authenticity, all about doves and rabbits, a holiday scrawl, rambling, scrambling, and uneven, and free from restraint as heart could desire. It appeared but yesterday since Helen Graham was herself a child; and here she was, within two miles of us, a widow and a mother!

Our correspondence had been broken off by the death of Mrs. Graham when she was about ten years old, and although I had twice called upon her in my casual visits to town during the lifetime of Mr. Cameron; and although these visits had been most punctually returned, it had happened, as those things do happen in dear, provoking London, where one is sure to miss the people one wishes most to see, that neither party had ever been at home; so that we had never met, and I was at full liberty to indulge in my foolish propensity of sketching in my mind's eye a fancy portrait of my unknown friend.

Il Penseroso is not more different from L'Allegro than was my anticipation from the charming reality. Remembering well her mother's delicate and fragile grace of figure and countenance, and coupling with that recollection her own unprotected and solitary state, and somewhat melancholy story, I had pictured to myself (as if contrast were not in this world of ours much more frequent than

congruity) a mild, pensive, interesting, fairhaired beauty, tall, pale, and slender; - I found a Hebe, and Euphrosyne, -a round, rosy, joyous creature, the very impersonation of youth, health, sweetness, and gaiety, laughter flashing from her hazel eyes, smiles dimpling round her coral lips, and the rich curls of her chestnut hair,-for having been fourteen months a widow, she had, of course, laid aside the peculiar dress,-the glossy ringlets of her "bonny brown hair" literally bursting from the comb that attempted to confine them.

We soon found that her mind was as charming as her person. Indeed, her face, lovely as it was, derived the best part of its loveliness from her sunny temper, her frank and ardent spirit, her affectionate and generous heart. It was the ever-varying expression, an expression which could not deceive, that lent such matchless charms to her glowing and animated countenance, and to the round and musical voice sweet as the spoken voice of Malibran, or the still fuller and more exquisite tones of Mrs. Jordan, which, true to the feeling of the moment, vibrated alike to the wildest gaiety and the deepest pathos. In a word, the chief beauty of Helen Cameron was her sensibility. It was the perfume to the rose.

Her little boy, born just before his father's death, and upon whom she doted, was a magnificent piece of still life. Calm, placid, dignified, an infant Hercules for strength and fair proportions, grave as a judge, quiet as a flower, he was, in point of age, exactly at that most delightful period when children are very pleasant to look upon, and require no other sort of notice whatsoever. Of course this state of perfection could not be expected to continue. The young gentleman would soon aspire to the accomplishments of walking and talking-and then!-but as that hour of turmoil and commotion to which his mamma looked forward with ecstasy was yet at some months' distance, I contented myself with saying of master Archy, with considerably less than the usual falsehood, that which everybody does say of only children, that he was the finest baby that ever was seen.

We met almost every day. Mrs. Cameron was never weary of driving about our beautiful lanes in her little pony-carriage, and usually called upon us in her way home, we being not merely her oldest, but almost her only friends; for lively and social as was her temper, there was a little touch of shyness about her, which induced her rather to shun than to court the company of strangers. And indeed the cheerfulness of temper, and activity of mind, which made her so charming an acquisition to a small circle, rendered her independent of general society. Busy as a bee, sportive as a butterfly, she passed the greater part of her time in the open air, and, having caught from me that very contagious and en