I AM not superstitious. I am not nervous. I am not romantic. I may have had the commune malum, just as I have had the measles and the hooping-cough, and got over it, too, just as easily. I am fifty-nine years of age. I weigh fourteen stone, and stand five feet eight in my stockings. I would as soon take hemlock as smoke a cigar; and I drink the best part of a bottle of old port every day after dinner. In very hot or very cold weather I generally finish it. These facts I mention simply to deduce the conclusion that I am not a man whose feelings are easily worked upon through the imagination. Imagination, indeed! I despise the quality, and disapprove of the expression. Although I can stand music, I never had any patience with poetry.

"A primrose on the river's brim,

A yellow primrose was to him-"

and so it is to me-" a flower, and nothing more." What more should it be?

I

never saw but one poet to my knowledge, and his acquaintance I made professionally. His notion of business was below contempt. I am one of those people who believe nothing they hear, and only half they see, unless supported by credible testimony; and I sum up all the ridiculous nonsense talked about idealities and sympathies, and odylic affinities and magnetic attraction, in the one comprehensive word "Bosh." I think I have said enough to lead to this inference, that I am no believer in ghosts.

Some winters ago I went down into the the west of England, to stay with my old friend and schoolfellow, H. It is no breach of confidence to state that I was employed to draw up the marriage contract of his pretty daughter Alice, a young lady who has sat on my knees scores of times, and whom I would have married myself had I been thirty years younger, and an idle man. She and her lover were to make up two pence half-penny per an

num between them; nevertheless, a settlement was to be made, a jointure provided, and younger children's portion devised in the regular manner. So I packed my portmanteau, delighted with the prospect of a holiday; not that I am overworked in Carey street, Lincoln's Inn, (more's the pity,) and started off by the train, as pleased as a boy out of school.

As a practical man, I am of course in favor of rail-roads whenever and wherever a line can be laid down. Time is money, knowledge is power, business is-business, not a doubt of it; and although I do not invest in shares, and prefer to follow a less speedy but more secure method of building up a competency, I am keenly alive to the advantages of steam traffic through the length and breadth of Britain. Yet I can not help regretting the long coaches. It may be early associations, it may be a John-Bull sort of prejudice in favor of that most national feature, which continental authorities strove to imitate in vain; it may be the germ of a sporting tendency indigenous to the Briton, which makes the least venturous amongst us theoretically partial to a horse; but I do own to a longing for the box-seat once more, the apron tucked in over one's knees, the rattle of hoofs and harness beneath one's feet, planted well forward on the foot-board, the coachman's knowing figure by one's side, with his drivinggloves and his well-tied neckcloth, and his peculiar expression of hat, the glasses of "hot with" at the different stages, the "pleasing to alight" for that indigestible dinner, of which underdone boiled beef invariably formed a component part; the close intimacy struck up with the "through" passenger behind one, whose sharp knees effected a permanent lodgment in the small of one's back; the interchange of broad wit with the guard, leaning forward over the roof expressly to poke fun at the raw country lad, taking his shilling ride to the next market-town; and drawing from its long wicker case the yard of tin, to woo from that instrument sounds such as are never heard now. The local news elicited from mysterious ostlers in a dialect varying with every twenty miles of Mac-Adam; and the close-shaved, well-dressed individual who was to be seen at every change with a straw in his mouth, addressed simply as "Squire" by the coachman, and on terms of respectful familiarity with that func

tionary. You never see that man at the door of a rail-way station-you never see him at all in these days. What has become of him? What has become of all the varieties and humors and adventures of the road? Nowadays the journey is nothing per se. Your only object is to get it over. You shut the windows, buy a shilling's worth of fiction, cut it open with your rail-way ticket, and resign yourself to "the company" in a state of total abstraction. If you have an adventure, why the chances are you do not live to tell it!

The train was punctual, the fly was damp, the evening cold and dark, inclining to a black frost, with a north-east wind that gets through my great coat as it never used to do-they make such bad cloth nowadays. I was very glad to grope up the long dark avenue of my friend's well-wooded residence, and more glad still to pay the flyman his fare, and divest myself of my wraps, and so to be ushered into a warm, well-lighted, cheerful apartment, in which the family were already assembled at dinner. A meal they insisted on my partaking of without going through the ceremony of dressing.

It was a small family party. H, ruddy, athletic, happy, and full of fun as usual. His wife, a superior woman with a masculine turn of mind, a little more embonpoint than the last time I saw her, and with hair that a few years ago was somewhat thin and gray, now black, thick, and glossy as the raven's wing once more. Daughter Alice, with sweet hazel eyes and rich brown hair, and the mantling blushes of nineteen, "silly nineteen!" with a lover of her own, and just going to be married. I dare say she thought there was nobody on earth the least to be compared with that young gentleman who sat opposite to her; that he would always be invested with those fabulous qualities which adorn the future bridegroom; that the time was never to come when he would go to sleep in his arm-chair, or snore in the night-watches, or drink beer, or smoke tobacco, or get fat or cross, or worse than all, bald! And then it had been such a long attachment, as she told me afterwards. Poor child! she had known him six months, during which period she had met him at an archery-meeting, a race-ball, and three country-houses. A long attachment, forsooth! And I recollect a case (professional) in which twen

for the first time for years my whole person, and was surprised to find how stout I had grown; and a lofty bed, in the vast extent of which, with its breadth of counterpane and its pillows so wide apart, and its cold clean sheets, I felt that, stout as I was, I should be chilled, and lost, and lonely. It is a cruel and ingenious torture thus to mock us poor bachelors; nevertheless we are not entirely to be pitied.

There was small temptation to exchange the warmth of the hearth-rug on which I stood toasting myself, for a plunge into that comfortless bed, so I lingered as long as I could over the operation of undressing, studying meanwhile a picture over the chimney-piece, at which the more I looked the more I was struck by an inexplicable fascination. It was a full-length portrait of a lady dressed in the liberal costume of Charles the Second's reign, and had all the appearance of one of Sir Peter Lely's chef-d'oeuvres. Her light-brown hair hung in rich profusion over her neck and shoulders, making, so to speak, a cascade over a sort of roll above her forehead ere it escaped in graceful clusters; her bust was full, round, and white, corresponding with the fair proportions of her shapely arms; her figure, firm and majestic, gaining hight and dignity from the folds of a long flowing satin gown, the bright yellow gloss of which the artist had depicted with admirable fidelity. All the details of a lady's dress-the fine cambric, the exquisite point-lace, the massive jewelry-were studiously worked out and dwelt upon evidently by the hand of a master; but the principal peculiarity in the painting, and that which chiefly riveted my attention, was the expression of the lady's countenance. With rounded cheeks and chin, with a fleshy and somewhat sensuous cast of beauty, the features betrayed a singular amount of resolution, almost of obstinacy; the light-blue eyes had a fixed stony glare of dogged suffering like that of some wild animal caught in a trap; and the whole countenance was imbued with an air of defiant endurance less the expression of a resigned martyr than of a savage at the stake.

One hand was closely pressed to her bosom, the other half-concealed in the folds of the satin dress, but on its soft white palm, turning outwards, there was a narrow stain as of blood.

"How carelessly all painters dab on

these patches of red," said I to myself, with a yawn, as I put the extinguisher on my candle, and jumped into bed, burying my head well under the clothes to condense as much as possible the caloric so indispensable to a good night's rest in the month of January.

As I reappeared on the surface the fire flickered up for an instant, and brought into full relief the yellow satin gown and the head and shoulders of the portrait. By some comical effect of light and shade the face seemed to turn away from the door, to which I remembered it to have been looking, and to gaze fixedly in the direction of my bed. It would have frightened a child, I thought, as I rolled over to the other side and composed myself to sleep.

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Man is a creature of habit, and I am not ashamed to confess that I never rest very comfortably in a strange bed. Whether buried cosily in what a Scotch friend used to term "the depths of Glen Feathers," or poised on a spring mattress like a bird on the wave, it is sufficient that my couch should be one to which I am not accustomed to make me restless and uneasy. In this particular instance I tossed and turned repeatedly without attaining the desired attitude of repose; and it was not till I had heard the clock over the stables strike more than once that I dozed off into a fitful and unrefreshing slumber.

It was provoking to be roused by some one poking the fire so vehemently, an irritating noise to the nerves at the best, and doubly so in the feverish watches of a long night, and I was irritated accordingly.

"That literary young reprobate in the next room," thought I, "who, not satisfied with poisoning the house with tobacco and the public with sentiment, must needs sit up half the livelong night and keep honester folks from their natural rest; a nice bridegroom, indeed, pretty Alice! and a precious beginning for a well-conducted establishment. Good lack! what fools girls are!"

But the light burned strongly up in my own chamber. I saw it flickering against the opposite curtains of the bed, for I lay with my back to the fire-place, and the noise of the poker told me pretty plainly that the disturbance was at my own hearthrug and that some body was poking my own fire.