club in which the wholesome rule, that "members abroad are not liable for their yearly subscriptions," has induced you to keep your name, and the same waiter, apparently in the same attire, offers you the evening paper with the same flourish that used to call a smile to your countenance twenty years ago; and for a moment the magic of association makes you feel as young as that evergreen attendant. Look at him: he is neither bent nor wasted, neither wrinkled nor grey; he always looked like a waiter, and he looks just as like a waiter now as he did before you went abroad. What is his secret? and can he be induced to part with it for love or money? Perhaps he has no family cares. -Ah! the daily epistle from Mrs. Nogo, which the rogue presents on a silver salver, with a careless air that is enviable to a degree.

"Waiter! bring me a large glass of sherry, and a biscuit!” "Glass of sherry, Sir-yes, Sir! Biscuit, Sir-yes, Sir!" And now to see what information my news-loving lady can give me from Bath, where we still hold our head-quarters, and are considered, I rather flatter myself, what the purser's wife in Peter Simple" calls the Smiths of London"-" quite the topping people of the place. She still crosses her letters word for word, and line for line; and her hand, though faint and ladylike in appearance, gets more illegible every day. I wonder if 1 shall have to come to glasses at last! however, with the assistance of alternate sips at the goblet of sherry, I manage to decipher the contents, which a respect for the confidence of conjugal correspondence prevents me giving verbatim, but by which I am glad to learn that "the cockatoo and the white mice are well, though the bullfinch has broken his leg!" (the reader will infer from the importance of these pets, that my establishment is unblessed with a nursery)—" the mastiff puppy, as yet nameless, has been lost, and recovered at an enormous sacrifice; and Toko, a long-cared, useless spaniel, has been bitten by the butcher's dog. My own two hunters have the influenza, and one of the carriage-horses is lame "-which bulletin concludes the domestic details of this daily report. The remainder of the epistle, like its predecessors, is fuil of that ever-increasing intelligence which men call news, and gods scandal, and for the growth of which the climate of Bath appears peculiarly favourable. From its perusal I learn that the Honourable Lionel Legerdemain has been concerned in some most equivocal proceedings on the turf, and that it is doubtful whether even his exalted rank will enable him to retain his position in the immaculate society of Bath; that old Admiral Dolphin is paralytic, and poor Lady Ricketts dead; and young Graceless-formerly of the Guards-has behaved shamefully to her niece--that venerable Miss Dido supposed to be the most inveterate of spinsters--had been seen at ten o'clock at night walking with a man in a cloak, who, Mrs. Nogo's maid thought, was the postmaster at the corner, but whom Mrs. Champfront likewise saw, and declares to be Louis Napoléon; that people did more and more extraordinary things every day; and that she, Mrs. Nogo, did not know what the world would come to at last, etc., etc. The letter concluded with an earnest hope that my business in London would soon be brought to a close, and was further elongated by a postscript, to the effect that she had just seen young Constantine Slopes driving four in hand down Lansdowne-place; and people received him just the same as ever; though what had become of that Mrs. Bagshot, she had not an

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idea-only it would be extremely painful, considering the relationship and all, if accident should ever bring them together." This last piece of intelligence set me ruminating upon the many changes that had taken place since my own marriage. Our first establishment at Wildwood; the exploits of little Doctor Dott with the harriers; our removal to Bath, and the delightful réunions at Bagshot's house, of which Katethe now never-to-be-mentioned Kate-had been the ornament and the charm. Few were the years that had elapsed; and yet how far apart were the different individuals that had constituted those pleasant assemblages! My own wife, a confirmed invalid, never leaving the vicinity of her physician; my brother-in-law Topthorne, who had given up his hounds, relapsing into a sort of yeoman-never seeing a visitor, never associating with his equals-fast losing the manners and habits of a gentleman; poor Segundo fallen into the hanger-on of a sporting patron, who was himself obliged to reside at Boulogne, and living from hand to mouth in a foreign country, as, truth to tell, he was tolerably accustomed to living at home; Jack Raffleton, my early friend--the wildest of them all in his hot youth-was the only one of the lot whose after-career seemed prosperous and successful. But Jack, in all his escapades, was not only a thorough gentleman himself, but scrupulous only to associate with gentlemen, and this it was which invariably proved a safety-buoy to my volatile companion. Military distinction and a good appointment were doing their best for him in India; and the golden opinions which he gathered in command, seemed equal to the popularity he had formerly enjoyed in a subordinate capacity. There was some comfort in knowing that Jack was getting on well. But poor Joe Bagshot! how could I bear to think of him-the merry, kind-hearted, manly, athletic Joe! now living in weary solitude at his vicarage; going through his daily round of parochial duties, in a subdued, broken-hearted frame of mind, for which those duties alone appeared to possess the slightest interest. No more cricket! no more archery! no more joyful gatherings and active sports for that morose and altered man! They tell me his Herculean frame is shrunk and wasted, and that premature old age has furrowed his open brow, and silvered the waving clusters of his nutbrown hair. Since the morning she left him, with young Constantine Slopes-and her infatuation for that uninteresting youth is as unaccountable as the admiration she was capable of inspiring in su ch a mind as her husband's-Joe had never been seen to smile. A strong moral sense of his duties, and the responsibilities of his calling, prevented my friend from taking such vengeance as human opinion esteems only just for the greatest injury man can inflict on man; and those alone can appreciate the struggle it must have cost him to forego the reprisals which society enforces, who know as well as I do his gallant, fearless spirit, his high and sensitive feelings of what the world calls honour. Poor Joe Bagshot! time will deaden the acuteness of the pang; but time will never be able to restore that image whose place is now desolate in your heart the sunshine will never look as bright to you again in this world-but take comfort, old friend! no one knows better than yourself that the end of all is not here; were it so, yours would indeed be a cheerless lot. Nor are my own reflections on the past untinged by that bitter drop which has turned your cup to gall. Knowing as I did the heartlessness and vanity of Kate Cotherstone's character-having

myself so narrowly escaped shipwreck on the Circean rock, ought I not to have warned you ere it was too late? ought I not to have interposed between the moth and the candle-the frank, open-hearted country clergyman and the wily, finished coquette? She married just to obtain a certain position in society: she left you without a struggle the instant a more brilliant career appeared to open itself before her; and I hear the young dandies, as they daudle in here for their late luncheons, discussing in their careless, hap-hazard manner, the wit, the tact, the accomplishments, and the beauty of Mrs. Bagshot, as she still dares to call herself-her interesting widowhood (that is now the rôle), her wonderful equestrian skill, her extraordinary taste, and the furniture of her house near Chesham-place.

"Oh, sin! oh, sorrow! and oh, womankind!"

How this taste for moralizing grows upon one! I conclude it is one of the prosy habits which too surely accompany the approach of maturity -that reflective period when man, having arrived at the culminating point of his career, gazes down, as it were from an eminence, on the prospect both before and behind him, but pauses, chiefly to admire the landscape which he has already traversed, and prefers to dwell, not without exaggeration, on the past toils and triumphs of the halfcompleted journey, rather than look forward into the dim uncertainty of the future.

As I look back upon the follies and the failures of my irrevocable youth, it seems to me that, were it possible to turn back the wheelhad I the privilege of again living over those golden days, which shall return no more- -in no single instance should I act exactly as I have done; there has not been one occasion on which I should commit the same absurdities in the same manner. Whether the vagaries of a staid middle-aged gentleman, when submitted to the test of common sense, are less unaccountable than those of impetuous impulsive boyhood, I leave to the attentive observer of human nature to determine. All I know is, that like the retrospective octogenarian, who summed up his whole reflections on existence with the conclusion, "that if he had to live his time over again, he would eat more and drink less," I am convinced that though my follies might be equal in quantity, they would be essentially different in quality-though the madness were as apparent, the method would be by no means the same.

Not

Like many a wiser and better man, I have been the victim of an unworthy ambition-not the noble infirmity which urges the aspirer to be great-not the heaven-born sentiment which impels him to be good; but the paltry, and unmanly thirst for frivolous distinction, which, originating in vanity, finds its end in disappointment and disgust. satisfied to take the sports and amusements of life as I found them, it has been my desire to raise for myself a kind of spurious fame for proficiency in pursuits which, after all, deserve but to be the pastime of an idle hour, and even this worthless distinction I have failed to attain. When the man who had spent a lifetime in learning to balance peas ou the point of a needle, was brought before Alexander, the conqueror of the world ordered him the appropriate recompence of a packet of needles and a bushel of peas. Alas! my proficiency has not even deserved the Macedonian's sarcastic guerdon. Money, time, and perseverance have

been wasted, and I cannot balance the pea on the needle after all! In vain have my stud eaten their heads off at Melton, and I myself gone to the height of personal inconvenience, not to say bodily peril, to achieve a first-flight character on the grass. Can I lay my hand on my heart, and tax my memory with one single instance on which, after hounds had been running hard for ten minutes, I was present in the same field with them? I have ridden a two-hundred-guinea hunter, and been pounded by young Graceless on a forty-pound hack! I have placed my horse's head at Lord Rapid's tail, and vowing to stick to him throughout the day, have lost him in three fields! No! high Leicestershire was no arena for my prowess; and hopeless as was my success in the pastures, the turf was even worse. What availed it to elbow my way into the waving mass which constitutes the Ring at Epsom; or to swagger, with open betting-book, and pencil daintily fitted between my front teeth, down the sunny slopes at Ascot? The "make-and-shape" backer jumped at the odds I offered against his favourite, and showed his judgment by the form in which his selection swept past the goal an easy winner, and "the only horse I stood to lose by in the race;" or the better-informed leg, with his liberal investment against the Flyer that broke down this morning, gave me another opportunity of what is playfully termed "paying and looking pleasant. Shooting, deerstalking, sparring, cricket, hare-hunting, rowing, fishing, etc., not forgetting my first and only appearance as a jockey at Weatherley-I have had a turn at them all-and if this be what is meant by sowing wild oats," I can only say that in my case the crop has failed to pay the expenses of cultivation. My trip into the west of England, though itself the accident of an accident-the consequence of a fracas in which I had no business to be concerned-was in its effect not the least important of my vagaries; and that, too, originated in my ambition to obtain a certain share of fame as a sportsman in that out-of-the-way locality. Of my visit to Squire Topthorne, I confess there did spring some very decided consequences; but with my conviction that, in the words of Shakspeare, "your marriage comes by destiny," I forbear to make any reflections on that unavoidable catastrophe. And what has been the result of thus wasting the golden, the irretrievable years of early manhood-that important period in which alone can be laid the foundations for a future superstructure of utility and self-content, if not of distinction and renown-an edifice to which success in the more trifling pursuits of life should be but as the carving which decorates its pillars the ornamental work which softens the severer grandeur of the whole?

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A brief period of hollow excitement, constantly embittered by dissatisfaction and disappointment; a consciousness of time misspent and opportunities thrown away; something very nearly akin to remorse for the irremediable past; and above all, the degrading conviction that though age is steadily and surely stealing on, wisdom is still as far distant as ever, and the experience which makes "even fools wise" has in my own case been entirely thrown away.

"Could we but see ourselves as others see us," how different would be the estimate we should place on our characters! how much more seldom should we hear it remarked of such an one, "that it would be well to buy him at the world's price, and sell him at his own." Were