- he had smelt that smell before-indeed this was by no ineans the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He ne it stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his by fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorche Akin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted — crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and, surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hailstones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued.

"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you, but you must be eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got there, I say?”

"O, father, the pig, the pig, do come and taste how nice the burnt Dig eats."

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt ig.

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser aalf by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, "Eat sat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste- O Lord,” — with such like Darbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatura young monsier, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in Lis turn tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved rot altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both fat er and son fairly

sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter.

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good mea which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more fre quently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Som would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often a the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it, and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all present, - without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision; and, when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his Lordship's town house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might te cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming & whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron Roasting by the string, or spit, came in a century or two later, I for gat in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manu cript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts, mak the way among mankind.

335. A QUAKER'S MEETING.

Still-born Silence! thou that art
Flood-gate of the deeper heart!

Offspring of a heavenly kind!

Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the raind
Secrecy's confidant, and he

Who makes religion mystery!

Admiration'e speakingest tongue!

Leave, thy desert shades among,

Reverend hermits' hallowed cells,
Where retired devotion dwells!
With thy enthusiasms come,

Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb.1

Reader, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet mean; wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; wouldst thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet no without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite? -- come with me into a Quaker's Meeting.

Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithed self-mistrusting Ulysses. — Retire with me into a Quaker's Meeting.

For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery.

What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes?-here the goddess reigns and revels. "Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawl - nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds - than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itseif nath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight.

There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heai. By imperfect, I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. Tre perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so abro. utely as in a Quaker's Meeting. -Those first hermits did certair ly understand this principle when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by — say, a wife— he, or she, too (if that be probable), reading an.

1 Fro"Poems of all Sorts," by Richard Fleck: n. 1653

other, without interruption or oral communication? — can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words? — away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude.

To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of some cathedral, tiinea.ken;

Or under hanging mountains,

Or by the fall of fountains;

is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be felt."-The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quaker's Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions,

sands, ignoble things,

Dropt from the ruined sides of kings,→

but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the foreground-SILENCE - eldest of things - language of oid Night — primitive Discourser - to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression.

How reverend is the view of these hushed loads,
Looking tranquillity!

Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth), James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still!-so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of acne saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers.

How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have

seen faces in their assemblies upon which the dove sate visibly brood ing. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. - If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for what I have observed, speak seldomer.

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More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a ser mon not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the TONGUE, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. — O, when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench among the gentle Quakers!

Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity tranquil and herd-like as in the pasture - 66 forty feeding like one."

'The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil, and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily, and when they come up in Lands to their Whitsun conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United King lom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.

JOHN FOSTER. 1770-1843. (Manual, p. 464.)

FROM THE ESSAY "ON A MAN'S WRITING MEMOIRS OF HIMSELF.” 336. BLESSedness of a VIRTUOUS CHARACTER.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to record, or to hear, the story of a character which has received its form, and reached its maturity, under the strongest operations of religion. We do not know that there is a more beneficent or a more direct mode of the divine

agency in any part of the creation than that which " apprehends" a man, as apostolic langage expresses it, amidst the unthinking crowd, and leads him into serious reflection, into elevated devetion, into pro