leaping up. Yoho! Two stages, and the country roads are almost changed to a continuous street. Yoho, past marketgardens, rows of houses, villas, crescents, terraces, and squares; past waggons, coaches, carts; past early workmen, late stragglers, drunken men, and sober carriers of loads; past brick and mortar in its every shape; and in among the rattling pavements, where a jaunty seat upon a coach is not so easy to preserve! Yoho, down countless turnings, and through countless mazy ways, until an old inn-yard is gained, and Tom Pinch, getting down, quite stunned and giddy, is in London!

TWILIGHT CALM.

Он, pleasant eventide !

Clouds on the western side

C. DICKENS.

Grow grey and greyer, hiding the warm sun :
The bees and birds, their happy labours done,
Seek their close nests and bide.

Screened in the leafy wood

The stock-doves sit and brood:

The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough
But lazily; pauses; and settles now

Where once he stored his food.

One by one the flowers close,
Lily and dewy rose

Shutting their tender petals from the moon :
The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon
Are still the noisy crows.

The dormouse squats and eats
Choice little dainty bits

Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime;
Nibbling his fill, he stops from time to time
And listens where he sits.

From far the lowings come

Of cattle driven home:

From farther still the wind brings fitfully
The vast, continual murmur of the sea,
Now loud, now almost dumb.

The gnats whirl in the air,

The evening gnats; and there

The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail
For prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail

Comes forth clammy and bare.

Hark! that's the nightingale,
Telling the self-same tale

Her song told when this ancient earth was young:
So echoes answered when her song was sung

In the first wooded vale.

We call it love and pain,

The passion of her strain,

And yet we little understand or know
Why should it not be rather joy that so
Threbs in each throbbing vein ?

In separate herds the deer

Lie; here the bucks and here

The does, and by its mother sleeps the fawn:
Through all the hours of night until the dawn
They sleep, forgetting fear.

The hare sleeps where it lies

With wary half-closed eyes;

The cock has ceased to crow, the hen to cluck :
Only the fox is out, some heedless duck

Or chicken to surprise.

Remote, each single star

Comes out, till there they are

All shining brightly: how the dews fall damp! While close at hand the glow-worm lights her lamp, Or twinkles from afar.

But evening now is done

As much as if the sun

Day-giving had arisen in the east:

For night has come; and the great calm has ceased,

WILD SPORTS IN THE LOWLANDS.

SHORTLY after daybreak they sallied forth for Otterscopescaurs, the farmer leading the way. They soon quitted the little valley, and involved themselves among hills as steep as they could be without being precipitous. The sides often presented gullies, down which, in the winter season, or after heavy rain, the torrents descended with great fury. Some dappled mists still floated along the peaks of the hills, the remains of the morning clouds, for the frost had broken up with a smart shower. Through these fleecy screens were seen a hundred little temporary streamlets or rills, descending the sides of the mountains like silver threads. By small sheep-tracks along these steeps, over which Dinmont trotted with the most fearless confidence, they at length drew near the scene of sport, and began to see other men, both on horse and foot, making towards the place of rendezvous. Brown was puzzling himself to conceive how a fox-chase could take place among hills where it was barely possible for a pony, accustomed to the ground, to trot along, but where, quitting the track for half a yard's breadth, the rider might be either bogged, or precipitated down the bank. This wonder was not diminished when he came to the place of action.

They had gradually ascended very high, and now found themselves on a mountain-ridge overhanging a glen of great depth, but extremely narrow. Here the sportsmen had collected, with an apparatus which would have shocked a member of the Pychely Hunt; for, the object being the removal of a noxious and destructive animal, as well as the pleasures of the chase, poor Reynard was allowed much less fair play than when pursued in form through an open country. The strength of his habitation, however, and the nature of the ground by which it was surrounded on all sides, supplied what was wanting in the courtesy of his pursuers. The sides of the glen were broken banks of earth, and rocks of rotten

stone, which sank sheer down to the little winding stream below, affording here and there a tuft of scathed brushwood, or a patch of furze.

Along the edges of this ravine, which, as we have said, was very narrow, but of profound depth, the hunters on horse and foot ranged themselves; almost every farmer had with him at least a brace of large and fierce greyhounds, of the race of those deer-dogs which were formerly used in that country, but greatly lessened in size from being crossed with the common breed. The huntsman, a sort of provincial officer of the district, who receives a certain supply of meat, and a reward for every fox he destroys, was already at the bottom of the dell, whose echoes thundered to the chiding of two or three brace of fox-hounds. Terriers, including the whole generation of Pepper and Mustard, were also in attendance, having been sent forward under the care of a shepherd. Mongrel, whelp, and cur of low degree, filled up the burden of the chorus. The spectators on the brink of the ravine, or glen, held their greyhounds in leash in readiness to slip them at the fox, as soon as the activity of the party below should force him to abandon his cover.

The scene, though uncouth to the eye of a professed sportsman, had something in it wildly captivating. The shifting figures on the mountain ridge, having the sky for their background, appeared to move in the air. The dogs, impatient of their restraint, and maddened with the baying beneath, sprang here and there, and strained at the slips which prevented them from joining their companions. Looking down, the view was equally striking. The thin mists were not totally dispersed in the glen, so that it was often through their gauzy medium that the eye strove to discover the motions of the hunters below. Sometimes a breath of wind made the scene visible, the blue rill glittering as it twined itself through its blue and solitary dell. They could then see the shepherds springing with fearless activity from one dangerous point to another, and cheering the dogs on the scent-the whole so