spread a pall on her recumbent form. After the lapse of a few minutes they removed the sable and ominous covering; but Adelheid stirred not, breathed not, and a wild cry from the surrounding ecclesiastics announced to the gasping multitude-that she was dead. THE MARKET WOMAN. Mr. Robert Cruikshank in this portraiture, has most correctly delineated one of a numerouss class of women who are to be found at all times in the markets of the metropolis plying for a job. Their usual salutation is: "D'ye want a basket your honour;" and for a few pence they will carry an immense load of fruit and vegetables to any part of the town. They are really patterns of patient industry. In winter, many hours before daylight, and in summer, with the earliest dawn they are at their posts anxiously waiting the most trivial employment. Their principal resort is Covent Garden market, the garden of gardens, the part of London which is never out of season; where the produce of summer is to be had in winter, and where those of winter are found in summer. Here the market woman has her harvest, here at all seasons her basket finds employment. OLD FURNITURE. I love old furniture. It revives a thousand agreeable associations, and reminds us of days of ease, comfort, and competence. When I see the comely chair, with its tall twisted back, so conveniently constructed to give repose to the human frame, and its extended arms, forming an ample resting place to the tired elbows, I mourn the capriciousness of taste, which has deprived us of so convenient an article of domestic economy. We sit upon chairs 'tis true; but how unlike the chairs of our forefathers! No comfortable cushions; no tall capacious backs; no ample seats, with room to spare. He who should venture a nap on a modern chair would risk the dislocation of his neck. Good reader; if you are six feet high, (which thank my stars, I am not) often must you have been vexed with these unsocial inconveniences. If you are an old man, perhaps you remember the time when after a hard bout at riding or walking, you have kicked off your travelling boots, snugly invested your feet in your warm slippers, and throwing yourself in your capacious arm-chair, have reclined your head upon its accommodating back; then bringing your thumbs in comfortable juxta-position, you have sunk into a dose with as much facility and satisfaction, as if you had been reposing on your pillow. Those hours of enjoyment are passed. You have no chance of such a thing now-a-days. You may indeed manage an apology for a nap, supposing you are a short man, by hitching the hinder part of your head, hookfashion, upon the back of your chair, protruding your heels, and reclining in vacuo, supported only by the edge of the seat; but this is a perilous situation, and the odds are twenty to one, that your worship and the floor become near acquaint ance. The vanity of self-contemplation has alone preserved the mirror as an article of furniture for the drawing room. But modern innovation has done its best to strip it of all its ancient splendour. It is no longer inclosed in the curiously curved oaken frame, or the perforated gold one. A barbarous taste has on many occasions even displaced the glass from its old tenure, to invest it a gew-gaw enclosure of modern invention, while its former companion has either been thrown in the lumber room, or doomed to the ignominious office of lighting the fire. There is one article of old fashioned furniture, whose dismissal I sincerely deplore. I mean the screen. To say nothing of its convenience, for hiding a pretty girl, or concealing you from a dun, it was a vastly comfortable appendage on cold winter nights, to keep the wind from your shoulders. You could collect your snug family party round the fire, and throw' an air of social comfort over the circle, truly delightful. Then were the times for "quips and quirks and wreathed smiles;" then the enigma, the rebus, and the conundrum puzzled the young, and amused the old; the tale and joke, and spiced wine went round, and winter, stripped of all his terrors, laughed merrily, and enjoyed the scene. The screen was also a pleasing vehicle for taste and ingenuity. Its decorations were often of the most splendid and fanciful description :classical painting, wreaths and boquets of flowers, or beautiful japanned gold work; impressing the eye with a sense of elegance and grandeur, as well as convenience. I venerare the collectors of china. They remind one of the searches after the organic remains of a former world; and I love the careful spirit which promps them to secure from the vain touch of the vulgar, and to shield from the handling of careless fingers, these relics of the infancy of tea-drinking. A complete antique tea equipage, is a rare sight. It is absolutely refreshing to the eyes of a connoisseur to behold one in an undiminished state of preservation. The queer-shaped tea-pot; the Lilliputian cups and saucers, scarcely one-half the modern size, and whose diminutive appearance, marked the sense of luxury which was formerly attached to the infusion of the Chinese herb; the tall beaker, the canister, and the delightful et-ceteras which made up the ancient complement of the tea-table;-to behold, I say, in its pristine perfection, without crack or blemish, such a coup-d'œil of oriental elegance, is worth all the exertions of the moderns in this way, with their correct taste, and the classical a-laGrecque porcelain of the French, into the bargain. There is beauty in the very eccentricity of old china, which modern ingenuity cannot attain. The droll figures, unlike anything "in heaven above or earth beneath;" the sprawling dragons, infinitely shaped, and with no anatomical marks of distinction, by which to discern the head from the tail; the uncouth ornaments, like the no-meaning pattern of a Turkey carpet; the brilliant colours,-red, blue, and gold;-all present a striking combination, which a purer taste in vain attempts to emulate. When I cast my eyes towards the ceiling of an antique habitation, and to observe the rich stucco ornaments, or the paintings al fresco, that adorn it, and carry them down to the inconsequential articles of furniture that occupy the floor.the cabinet piano, with its profusion of silk curtains and giltwork, the petite chairs, the squab couches, the window hangings, with their varnished rods and tasselled finery, all in the pretty taste of gew-gaw and glitter, the contrast between the sober dignity of the room itself, and the pettiness of its ornaments, strikes forcibly on my mind. There is an incongruity that even habit cannot reconcile. I insensibly revert to the days, when damask curtains of splendid hue and intrinsic worth adorned those windows that are now decked out with the valueless gaudery of the linen-draper; when those |