"Ah! Augusta-Augusta had more sense,' she added," in her little finger than Ellen in her whole body. Augusta would be a countess, perhaps, when Ellen was a beggar and an old maid-and serve her right!"

CHAPTER LXVIII.

Crush'd was Napoleon by the Northern Thor,
Who knock'd his army down with icy hammer;
Stopp'd by the elements, like a whaler, or

A blundering novice in his German grammar.

So let us welcome cheerful evening in!

ВЕРРО.

Cowper.

The evening had closed in; a bright wood fire blazed and crackled in the little boudoir in which the Lindsays took tea. Ellen dispensed the fragrant beverage," which cheers, but not inebriates."

Mr. Grunter, his large head still bound in flannels, sate in a high, black, armed readingchair, to which a little table and lamp were

attached, waiting impatiently the finale of the repast, that he might regale the family with an intellectual banquet from "The History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History,"

The reader (considering the great and encouraging success of that great work) may be surprised that no other has as yet issued from the old usher's brain; but, as he once said himself," he wanted knack," Fitzcribb was not to be had at Winterthur, and no other hand could put the ponderous machine, Grunter's mind, in motion. So, not to resign the importance and mystery of authorship and literary pomp, he announced his intention, before undertaking a work even more stupendous in its nature, and awful in its results, than the " History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History," to add to his knowledge of the dead languages that of the mighty mother of our own tongue, the living German!

Now Ellen had a master; but Grunter did not choose to have reports of his progress (or non-progress) conveyed to his former pupil by a mutual teacher. So Grunter selected a taciturn old fellow, almost as crabbed as himself-one who gave very long lessons for very little pay. With this worthy Grunter was closeted every day; and strange noises, as of the German in wrath, and Grunter in despair, were (we grieve to say) occasionally heard by Miss Tibby, who was very jealous "o' the auld fule, Grunter, learning ony ither tongue at his time o' life, instead o' studying how to keep his ain in his head." She prophecied he would "bring on the bleeding o' his leg again, for his head was na' that strong, and, as Mr. Jobb was na' at hond, he'd, maybe, be carried off at short notice, and na' great loss either."

Poor Miss Tibby! had she known all, she would have had no reason to be jealous. The matchless difficulties of the German rudiments

first bewildered and then floored poor Grunter. The skill in penmanship acquired in his usher days enabled him to learn to write the German hand; but what he could write, he, alas, could not read!... No toil and drumming of himself or his master (who once forgot himself so far as to attempt to give him a shaking, which ended in his finding himself floored) could instil even the seven declensions into Grunter's mind. And, seeing this, after much pondering, he resolved not to give up the master, and thus proclaim his inability, but to announce to him that the elements of a foreign language were beneath the attention of a distinguished author in his own tongue; and then to employ him, during the lesson, in making translations from abstruse German sources, which he intended some day to remodel, with Fitzcribb's aid, and give to the world, in a grand work, called "The Literature of the German Empire, and the Empire of the German Literature."