THE MISSES.

We were talking last night, my dear Anne, of a family of Misses, whose acquaintance is generally avoided by people of sense. They are most of them old maids, which is not very surprising, considering that the qualities they possess are not the most desirable for a helpmate. They are a pretty numerous clan, and I shall endeavour to give you such a description of them as may enable you to decline their visits; especially as, though many of them are extremely unlike in feature and temper, and, indeed, very distantly related, yet they have a wonderful knack at introducing each other; so that if you open your doors to one of them, you are very likely, in process of time, to be troubled with the whole tribe.

india-rubber, and her drawing-paper, that her master's hour is expired before she has well got her materials together.

Miss Understanding. This lady comes of a respectable family, and has a half-sister distinguished for her good sense and solidity; but she herself, though not a little fond of reasoning, always takes the perverse side of any question; she is often seen with another of her intimates, Miss Representation, who is a great tale-bearer, and goes about from house to house telling people what such a one and such a one said of them behind their backs. Miss Representation is a notable story-teller, and can so change, enlarge, and dress up an anecdote, that the person to whom it happened should not know it again; how many friendships have been broken by these two, or turned into bitter enmities? The latter lady does a great deal of varnish work, which wonderfully sets off her paintings, for she pretends to use the pencil; but her productions are such miserable daubings, that it is the varnish alone that makes them pass the most common eye. Though she has all sorts, black varnish is what she uses most. As I wish you very much to be on your guard against this lady, whenever you meet her in company, I must tell you she is to be distinguished by a very ugly leer; it is quite out of her power to look straight at any object.

Miss Trust, a sour old creature, wrinkled und shaking with the palsy. She is continally peeping and prying about, in the expectation of finding something wrong; she watches her servants through the keyhole, and has lost all her friends by little shynesses, that have arisen no one knows how; she is worn away to skin and bone, and her voice never rises above a whisper.

The first I shall mention, and, indeed, she deserves to be mentioned first, for she was always very fond of being a ringleader of her company, is Miss Chief. The young lady was brought up, until she was fourteen, in a large rambling mansion in the country, where she was allowed to romp all day with the servants and idle boys of the neighbourhood. There she employed herself in the summer in tying the grass together across the path to throw people down; and in winter, making slides before the door for the same purpose; and the accidents these gave rise to always procured her the enjoyment of a hearty laugh. She was a great lover of fun; and at Christmas time distinguished herself by various tricks, such as putting furze balls into the beds, and pulling people's seats from under them. Miss was sent off to a boarding-school; here she was no small favourite with the girls, whom she led into all manner of scrapes; and no small plague to the poor governess, whose tables were hacked, and beds cut, and curtains set on fire con- Miss Rule. This lady is of a very lofty spirit, and tinually. It is true, Miss soon laid aside her romping had she been married, would certainly have governed her airs, and assumed a very demure appearance; but she husband; as it is, she interferes very much in the was always playing one sly trick or another, and had management of families; and as she is very highly conlearned to tell lies, in order to lay it upon the innocent. nected, she has as much influence in the fashionable At length she was discovered in the act of writing ano-world as amongst the lower orders. She even interferes nymous letters, by which whole families in the town had been set at variance; and she was then dismissed the school with ignominy. She has since lived a very busy life in the world; seldom is there a great crowd of which she does not make one, and she has even frequently been taken up for riots, and other disorderly proceedings.

The next I shall introduce to your acquaintance is a city lady, Miss Management, a very stirring notable woman, always in a bustle, and always behindhand. In the parlour, she saves candle-ends; in the kitchen, every thing is waste and extravagance; she hires her servants at half wages, and changes them at every quarter; she is a great buyer of cheap bargains, but as she cannot always use them, they grow worm and moth-eaten on her hands; when she pays a long score to her butcher, she wrangles for the odd pence, and forgets to add up the pounds. Though it is her great study to save, she is continually outrunning her income, which is partly owing to trusting a cousin of hers, Miss Calculation, with the settling her accounts, who, it is very well known, could never be persuaded to learn her multiplication table, or state rightly a sum in the rule of three.

Miss Lay and Miss Place are sisters, great slatterns. When Miss Place gets up in the morning she cannot find her combs, because she has put them in her writing-box. Miss Lay would willingly go to work, but her housewife is in the drawer of the kitchen-dresser, her bag hanging on a tree in the garden, and her thimble any where but in her pocket. If Miss Lay is going a journey, the keys of her trunk are sure to be lost. If Miss Place wants a volume out of her bookcase, she is certain not to find it along with the rest of the set. If you peep into Miss Place's dressing-room, you find her drawers filled with foul linen, and her best cap hanging upon the carpet broom. If you call Miss Lay to take a lesson in drawing, she is so long in gathering together her pencils, her chalk, her

in political concerns, and I have heard it whispered that there is scarcely a cabinet in Europe where she has not some share in the direction of affairs.

Miss Hap and Miss Chance. These are twin-sisters, so like as scarcely to be distinguished from each other; their whole conversation turns upon little disasters. They are both left-handed, and so exceedingly awkward and ungainly, that if you trust either of them with a cup and saucer, you are sure to have them broken. These ladies used frequently to keep days for visiting, and as people were not very fond of meeting them, many used to shut themselves up and see no company on those days, for fear of stumbling upon either of them; some people, even now, will hardly open their doors on Friday for fear of letting them in.

Miss Take. This lady is an old doting woman, who is purblind, and has lost her memory; she invites her acquaintance on wrong days, calls them by wrong names, and always intends to do just the contrary thing to what she does.

Miss Fortune. This lady has the most forbidding look of any of the clan, and people are sufficiently disposed to avoid her as much as it is in their power to do; yet some pretend, that notwithstanding the sternness of her countenance on the first address, her physiognomy softens as you grow more familiar with her; and though she has it not in her power to be an agreeable acquaintance, she has sometimes proved a valuable friend. There are lessons which none can teach as well as herself, and the wisest philosophers have not scrupled to acknowledge themselves the better for her company.—Barbauld.

TRANSCENDENTALISM is the spiritual cognoscence of psychological irrefragability, connected with concutient ademption of incoluminent spirituality and etherialized contention of subsultory concretion.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE LABOURS OF IDLENESS," &c. WHEN Scanderbeg, Prince of Epirus, was dead, the

The industrious man, who earns his subsistence in one way or another, is possessed of a broad mind, and a noble disposition. Dissatisfied with the gifts of fortune, he seeks to acquire another and a better destiny, and he pur-proved, but when unemployed, become dull and heavy, sues the things to which he aspires with perseverance and adventurous courage through difficulties and obstacles; he is indebted for the conveniences of life neither to the labour nor to the liberality of others; he pilfers no livelihood from the world; he reaps no benefit from the care and toil of his fellow creatures. No burden and no trouble to them, he supports himself by his own industry. The bread he eats, he earns. Such a man is industrious upon principles of conscience and honour; and in whatever condition of life he may be placed, he is a benefit and an ornament to society.

A SOUL AMONGST THE VAGRANTS.

BY SILVERPEN.

(Concluded from our last.)

As soon as the blind child's unpremeditated harmony had ceased, which it did by such sweet links of gradual fineness, as falling, and still falling, like a forest runnel far away into shadowing leaves, it melted into silence before the finest ear knew that the pause had come, Emanuel crossed the kitchen, parted the crowd, and stood, beside the miserable bed, a pace or two from the vagrant girl. She cowered beneath his steady glance, mild and yet sorrowful; and kneeling down presently beside the child, sought, as it seemed, still more to shut out the look of reproof so cast upon her.

"I thought, Leah," he said, in a voice which conveyed the expression of his face, "your penitence was sincere; I thought, when you came out of gaol, you would have kept at the Refuge, and tried to show those interested in your welfare, that the good preached was not in vain."

Still cowering beside the miserable heap of straw, and visibly trembling, she replied, naively, and in a manner which deprecated anger, "I was forced to come here."

"But, Leah, where penitence was true, even a place, or a company like this, would offer no temptations. In prison you were penitent, in the Refuge steady, and why

The vagrant girl did not allow the preacher to finish this reproof, for still more deprecatingly she said, "I was forced to come here; vagrants and trampers sich as we, Sir, ain't no other home, and in sich homes, Sir, we do as others do."

*

"Come, none o' this, my man; beggars can't expect a palace, and worser ain't done here than in t'other houses in the tup'penny lodging line. So be marching. For though I've great respect for Huggins's man o' business, too many sermons and preachers ain't the sort o' things here." Saying thus, he set his hand with a fierce clutch upon the shoulder of the one he addressed, and winking at a group of young fellows, seated round the nearest ginbottle, bid them, as it were, render him such active assistance as they might fancy, or think proper. But the instant these had sprung to their feet, with an alacrity which showed how ready they were to execute any command, however nefarious or brutal, Mr. Redtape, who had kept close by the door, opened it with a quick hand, and admitted three or four men, who, though in plain clothes, were instantly recognised, by many present, as policemen. Without, however, calling further upon their assistance, Mr. Redtape, in his own person, pushed his way through he gathering crowd, and said, peremptorily, to the man in the flannel jacket,

"Do you know, Mr. Slink, whom you're addressing? If you don't, it's Huggins's heir, to whom you owe a year and a half's rent, and a back debt for repairs. The document lies at my office, and will be forwarded to you in the morning. So take your hands off-you touch a gentleman." At this magnanimous speech of the worthy little Redtape, the man in the flannel jacket and red handkerchief, without more than a mingled look of hate and fear, which for the instant gave to his bloated features, and bloodshot eyes, the most sinister expression imaginable, slunk back to his seat behind a sort of low dresser, in a far part of the kitchen, from The motley crowd which for the time had been drawn which he dispensed, at some three hundred per cent. from the coarse and demoralizing pleasures of the gin-profit, such luxuries of food and drink as his more probottle, the pipe, the pitch-and-toss, the cards, the brawl, fligate customers could afford. the brutal jest, or soothed for the moment from out of the despair of hunger and destitution, by the Orphean music of the blind child's hand, had now mostly resumed their former places, round the table, on the benches, or before the fire, leaving none but a few women, and some children, gathered round the kneeling vagrant. But evidently hearing what the preacher had said, though the roar of the Babel had now almost reached its former height, the man of abstract gaze passed from the door beside which he had hitherto stood, and touched him on the shoulder.

"Can you believe," he said, "that words alone will carry out great reformations, either in the individual or in society? Can you expect that words alone will give a harvest from a soil like this, where every influence deadens and debases? If you do so, you carry onwards society's worst fallacy, which is, that words are of more efficacy than action. We build prisons, and we have chaplains; we have a criminal code, and judicial administrators; we have ragged-schools, and thousands of noble and self-denying teachers therein; but, whilst public dens and nuisances, such as this before us, are allowed to go uncontrolled by law; whilst old and young, innocence and guilt, are thus suffered to herd together in a promiscuous throng; whilst we do not open to the young, and those simply poor, to the wayfarer and the wretched orphan children of our city streets, more decent nightly shelter than such as this, an army of preachers, a million of schools, are half valueless; for society herein fosters the crime it is called upon with solemnity, and monstrous cost, to punish; and you ask of the untaught, unfed vagrants here, virtues which an angel could not practice in such a den."

Whatever might have been the mild and gentle preacher's answer, it was peremptorily stayed by a little, waddling, thick-set old man, habited in a dirty flannel jacket, above which peeped a red silk bandana handkerchief tied loosely round his throat, and who, pushing his way between the preacher and the man of science, said, coarsely,

As Mr. Slink thus returned to his tabernacle of dusty bottles queerly labelled, little wet-lipped pewter measures, one fat Dutch-like keg, mysterious drawers in a nest affixed to the wall at his back, and scores of elegant chamber-candlesticks of such original device as to have had nature for their modeller, being no other than oyster shells, primitively lined with clay, serving to hold the third of an inch of candle, a howl, from two or three women close at hand arrested John Plowden, as he followed Redtape and the policemen to the door. He returned rapidly to where he had stood some minutes previously, and found Emanuel bending abstractedly above the sick child, whilst the vagrant, kneeling with her arms round his neck, was partly raising up his deathlike faceas he had swooned-for the women to sprinkle it with water from the violet jug, and blow upon it, as they did, for the purpose of reviving him. Plowden glanced down upon the child, and then waving his hand to the master of the Dutch keg, called for a glass of brandy. When this was brought, after some delay, in a little battered pewter measure, he knelt and poured a few drops between the child's dead lips, with a gentleness which showed the infinite mercy of his large and genuine heart. As these few drops revived a little, and the pulsation hitherto still, trembled, and ebbed and flowed, like an eolian chord, touched by the passing wind, or like a flickering strip of sun upon a dim cathedral floor, Plowden bid the most decent woman of the group fold him in the coarse blue cloak she had upon her, and follow him. "And you, too," he said, to Leah, as she unfolded her arms, and assisted the women to wrap up the child. When they had done this, and were ready to follow him, the great mathematician took the mild and gentle preacher by the hand, and spoke as good men speak when they recognise a kindred soul.

"ACTION AS WELL AS PRAYER, Sir. The two in unison become a perfect operating whole; come with me, therefore, and let us see what work and faith can do, in rooting out such a curse as this from the bosom of civilized communities; for recollect, we have pregnant

ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL.

The pieces, panels of wainscot-work, thick carved balustrades
of vast old oaken staircases, window frames, rusty grates
and boilers, and planks of ancient flooring, making
the place look for all the world like an hospital for
decayed houses, by no means juvenile, or new-built,
at the epoch of the Fire of London. Unlocking the
door of the old house they now reached, John Plowdon
admitted his little party into a wide, old, gloomy hall,
totally unfurnished; and guided by a candle, which stood
burning at the stairs' foot, led the way up the broad stair-
case, across a sort of gallery, similar to the one below,
though piled up like a lumberer's shop, with all sorts of
nondescript furniture. Just as he reached a door, through
the chinks of which a light shone, it was quickly opened,
and a little creature of a woman, his very image and
likeness, only that she was pretty, and much younger,
who not seeing, perhaps, by reason of the dull light and
shadowing furniture, that he had company, hurried for-
ward, and, clasping both his hands within her own,
exclaimed,-

texts for ACTION as a helpmate to FAITH.
multitude were fed when they were hungry, and the
Samaritan bound up the stranger's wounds with oil and
balm. Come with me." As if led by the unresistible power
of a stronger will than his own, the preacher bent his
head in acquiescence, and followed the mathematician with
a ready step. Marshalled out by the magnanimous little
Redtape, amidst the wonder and curiosity of the motley
crowd, Plowden and the preacher had partly crossed the
pestiferous court towards the street, when all at once a
shoeless, ragged urchin darting past them, and taking
the worthy little attorney off his guard for an instant, by
uttering a loud and unearthly cry just at his ear, seized
the black ribbon which hung across his velvet waistcoat,
and giving it a pull which burst it like a thread, dragged
forth the watch it held, and ran towards the mouth of
the court. It was a hazardous trick, seeing the police
were at his heels; and the result was such as might have
naturally been expected. After a short chase, the lad was
captured, and brought back to where Mr. Redtape, in an
uncontrolled fit of laughter, stood with the rest of the
party.

"Eh! eh! I left my chain and forty guinea repeater
at home, of course I did, so don't make a charge of it my
men; the thing don't go, for it hasn't neither main-
spring nor fly-wheel. It was a make-believe, gentlemen,
And Redtape laughed still more.
a make-believe."

"But we must, Sir," said the police sergeant, respectfully, "for this lad, as ain't yet ten, is the very worst thief in London. Why, gentlemen, he's been seventeen times in gaol, and whipped six, and yet bain't no better."

"I'm so glad that you are back, John; for, though I am no coward, seeing that I have been always used to a lone country place, still this is a very dull old house, and conjures up a hundred fancies of the brain. I'm very glad you're back again."

The mathematician, stooping, kissed the young girl tenderly; and then moving her gently from him a pace or two, so that she stood in the full light of the open door, said, as he turned towards the preacher in the rear, "My only sister, Sir, Magdalene Plowdon."

Bashful, to find herself thus in the midst of strangers, the young girl pushed the door more open, and ushered her "Yes," chimed in the lad, with such cool sang froid brother and the preacher into an immense old panelled as to approach the humourous, "I've bin cotched a pre-room, greatly lumbered up, like the gallery near, with cious sight o' times; and this 'n's to be a tight pull up, as him as is sergeant promised me, last time I went 'afore him. But what care I; I'se known prison too long to care tuppence." So saying, he buttoned up the single button of the old corduroy coat he wore, with the air of a Macheath, and then, as if submitting to an act of glory, he allowed the handcuffs to be put on him, and followed the policemen full of jest and joke. Mr. Red-upon rippling water. tape, in order to make the necessitated charge, followed in that direction too, and this most reluctantly; for none dislike the law so much as those who know best the law's vexation and delay.

"Such is the fruit of our system of punishments," said Plowdon, as he proceeded onwards.

It isn't so much the fault of the law, Sir," spoke the policeman, who stayed to attend Mr. Plowdon till he had passed into a more open thoroughfare; "but it's allowing such places as this of Slink's to go uncontrolled. Why, whatever good lads take in gaol, and they do a good deal very often, is soon put out of them, when they've no better homes to come back to than these sort o' lodging-houses. Ay, Sir, if Sergeant Verney, as is so sharp on lads, like this one just charged, could just see the dens they have for homes, he'd come to the root of the evil, which he never will whilst he sits on the bench, punishing severely because he thinks that nothing 'Il cure crime except the gaoler's key, or the task-master's whip."

heaps of rusty locks of all sizes, nails, screws, iron rods, window lines, and a thousand odds and ends, heaped on the floor, and on dusty shelves and tables. But a fine fire glowed in the enormous old grate, and so far sent its warmth and light across the otherwise sad and desolate chamber, as to shine within the remotest shadows, and A sort of lozenge shaped table had flicker up and down the walls, like noonday sunbeams been drawn before the fire, and on this stood cups and saucers, bread and butter, whilst on the huge_hob were the only things new in that strange room, and shone steamed a bright new tin tea-kettle and coffee-pot. They like diamonds in a coal mine.

"You will pardon this sort of place," said the mathematician to the preacher, as Magdalene drew an old worn leather chair for him beside the table, "but this has been a miser's habitation; and as my sister only came up from Shropshire this morning, and we have not taken possession of it many hours, you must excuse much which So saying, he again took Magdalene's hand, and you see, though Magdalene has certainly done wonders." beckoning to Leah and the Irishwoman, who had entered the room, but had not advanced beyond the shadow of the doorway, he opened the ragged cloak, and displayed to the astonished gaze of this little sister, the miserable, wasted, fevered Irish lad.

'Though fevered and blind, and dying, perhaps, my dear one," he said, subduing his voice so low, as to make it only audible to this little sister's ear, "there is such infinite delicacy in these wasted fingers, such an ear for harmony, such a power within the soul to touch, and for the time influence the worst of passions, as, scen and heard in the vagrants' lodging-house to night, has given me new thoughts as to the moral influences man may be able to bring towards the diminution and eradication of crime. Therefore, we must do our best

Plowdon made no answer, but led the way rapidly onward, across Smithfield, to London Wall, and thence from the open street into one of those old, quaint, flagstoned courts which lie often hidden in districts such as this. At this hour of night, it had a monastic stillness about it, which brought to mind dim cloisters far away in woodland solitudes; and it bore this sort of still and hidden aspect probably through the day, as its flag-way was little worn by human feet, and the houses round It would have done good to a million hard and worldly very old, were mostly with blank windows turned towards to save, through action as well as pity." the court. On either side this flagged path-way, which led to a house at the end, towards which Plowdon pro- hearts, perhaps, to have seen the great mathematician's ceeded, lay, covered with lichens and mildew, from long little sister when this was spoken; how the largest pity exposure to the weather, old door stalls, wooden chimney-beamed upon her face, as the full sun's rays upon a