And Peter, who did not expect such a rough visit,

Cried lustily, "Stop! That will do, Broomstick!-Sufficit!"

To check, and call off from their headlong career,
By bawling out "Yoicks!" with one's hand at one's ear.
The longer he roar'd, and the louder and quicker,
The faster the Broomstick was bringing in liquor.

The poor Lay-brother knew

Not on earth what to do

He caught hold of the Broomstick and snapt it in two.-
Worse and worse!-Like a dart

Each part made a start,

And he found he'd been adding more fuel to fire,
For both now came loaded with Meux's Entire;

Combe's, Delafield's, Hanbury's, Truman's-no stopping-
Goding's, Charenton's, Whitbread's continued to drop in,
With Hodson's pale ale, from the Sun Brewhouse, Wapping.
The firms differ'd then, but I can't put a tax on
My memory to say what their names were in Saxon.
To be sure the best beer

Of all did not appear;

For I've said 'twas in June, and so late in the year
The "Trinity Audit Ale" is not come-at-able,

As I found to my great grief last month when at that table.

Now extremely alarm'd, Peter scream'd without ceasing,
For a flood of Brown-stout he was up to his knees in,
Which, thanks to the Broomsticks, continued increasing;
He fear'd he'd be drown'd,

And he yell'd till the sound

Of his voice, wing'd by terror, at last reach'd the ear
Of St. Dunstan himself, who had finish'd his beer,
And had put off his mitre, dalmatic, and shoes,
And was just stepping into his bed for a snooze.

His Holiness paused when he heard such a clatter;
He could not conceive what on earth was the matter.
Slipping on a few things, for the sake of decorum,
He issued forthwith from his sanctum sanctorum,
And calling a few of the lay-brothers near him,
Who were not yet in bed, and who happen'd to hear him,
At once led the way,

Without farther delay,

To the tower where he 'd been in the course of the day.

Poor Peter!-alas! though St. Dunstan was quick,

There were two there before him-Grim Death and Old Nick!-
When they opened the door out the malt-liquor flow'd,

Just as when the great Vat burst in Tot'nam Court Road;
The Lay-brothers nearest were up to their necks
In an instant, and swimming in strong double X;
While Peter, who, spite of himself, now had drank hard,
After floating awhile, like a toast in a tankard,
To the bottom had sunk,

And was spied by a monk,

Stone dead, like poor Clarence, half drown'd and half drunk.
In vain did St. Dunstan exclaim" Vade retro
Strongbeerum! discede a Lay-fratre Petro!”—
Queer Latin, you'll say

That præfix of "Lay,"

And Strongbeerum!-I own they'd have call'd me a blockhead if
At school I had ventured to use such a Vocative,
'Tis a barbarous word, and to me it's a query
If you'll find it in Patrick, Morell, or Moreri;
But, the fact is, the Saint was uncommonly flurried,
And apt to be loose in his Latin when hurried;
At a time, too, like this, you can well understand,
That he had not, like Bentley, an Ainsworth at hand.
The Brown-stout, however, obeys to the letter,
Quite as well as if talk'd to, in Latin much better,
By a grave Cambridge Johnian,
Or graver Oxonian,

Whose language, we all know, is quite Ciceronian.
It retires from the corpse, which is left high and dry;
But, in vain do they snuff and hot towels apply,
And other means used by the faculty try.

When once a man's dead

There's no more to be said,

Peter's "Beer with an e" was his "Bier with an i!!"

Moral.

By way of a moral, permit me to pop in
The following maxims :-Beware of eaves-dropping!—
Don't make use of language that isn't well scann'd!-
Don't meddle with matters you don't understand!—
Above all, what I'd wish to impress on both sexes
Is,-Keep clear of Broomsticks, Old Nick, and three XXXs.
L'Envoye.

In Goldsmith's Hall there's a handsome glass case,
And in it a stone figure found on the place,
When, thinking the old Hall no longer a pleasant one,
They pull'd it all down, and erected the present one.
If you look, you'll perceive that this stone figure twists
A thing like a broomstick in one of its fists.
It's so injured by time, you can't make out a feature ;
But it is not St. Dunstan,-so no doubt it 's Peter.

96

COLIN CLIN K.

BY CHARLES HOOTON.

CHAPTER XII.

Briefly details a slight love-skirmish between Sammy and Miss Sowersoft, which took place before Colin, while that youth was supposed to be asleep, and also illustrates the manner in which old maids sometimes endeavour to procure themselves husbands.-Colin's employment at the lodge. He becomes involved in a dilemma, which threatens unheard of consequences.

AFTER Colin had spent some twenty minutes where we left him at the conclusion of the eleventh chapter, he crept into bed. The room in which he lay being partly in the roof, admitted only of a very small window in the upright portion of the wall, and that was placed so close to the floor as to throw very little light into the apartment, except during a strong day or moonlight.

The candle being extinguished, Colin could see nothing save a small square of dim light where the window was. Below stairs he could hear the muttering of voices, as Miss Sowersoft dabbed Palethorpe's eyes with her cloth and warm water; and in the false floor over his head the sound of rats, who were at work in the roof, making noise sufficient over their labours to have kept awake, during the whole night, any person less accustomed to that kind of nocturnal entertainment than the inhabit

ants of country-houses usually are. Colin could usually have slept soundly had all the rats in Christendom been let loose in a legion about him, but he could not sleep to-night. It was pitchdark; he was in a strange place, with brutal employers, who disliked him only because he had offered to relieve a poor old man of some portion of his labours. Who knew-for such things had been heard of, and passionate men often took their revenge, regardless of consequences-who knew, as Mr. Palethorpe was to occupy the adjoining bed, that he might not take advantage of his sleep, and steal out in the night to murder him? He might do so, and then throw him down the brook, as he had threatened, or perhaps bury him deep in the garden, and say in the morning that he had run away.

With these, and similar imaginations, did Colin keep himself awake in a feverish state of terror during a space of time which to him seemed almost endless; for, however groundless and ridiculous such fears may be deemed by the stout-hearted reader who peruses this by broad daylight, he must be pleased to call to mind that poor Colin was neither of an age nor in a situation in which great account is commonly made of probabilities. The boy's fancies were at length interrupted by the appearance of something more real. A light shot through the chinks of the door, and run an ignis-fatuus kind of chase

round the walls and ceiling, as it advanced up stairs in the hands of the maid Sally. Shortly afterwards the door was gently pushed open; and while Colin's heart beat violently against the bars of its cage, and his breath came short and loud, like that of a sleeper in a troubled dream, he saw a huge warming-pan flaring through its twenty eyes with red-hot cinders, protruded through the opening, and at the other end of the handle Miss Sally herself. She placed her candle down in the passage, in order to avoid awakening Colin with its light, and then commenced warming Mr. Palethorpe's bed with that peculiar skill and delicacy of touch, which at once betrayed the experienced hand of a mistress. By the time that operation was about finished, the feet of two other individuals creeping cautiously up were heard on the stairs. Then a voice whispered circumspectly, but earnestly,

"Now, Sammy, make haste and get in while it is nice and hot, or else it will do you no good; and in a minute or two I'll be up again with that warm posset, so that you can have it when you've lain down."

Sammy and Miss Sowersoft then entered, the latter having come up stairs with no other intention, apparently, than that of frustrating by her presence any design which Palethorpe might else have had of rewarding Sally for her trouble with a gentle salute upon the cheek. Having seen the maid safe out of the chamber, Miss Maria returned down stairs.

Colin now began to tremble in earnest; for he indistinctly heard Palethorpe muttering words of violence against every one of them without exception, and threatening to kick the house upside down before another day was over his head. By and by the cautious approach of his footsteps towards Colin's bed caused the boy to peep out through the merest chink between his eyelids, when he beheld the hideous face of the farming-man almost close to his own, with its huge swollen and blackened features fixed in an expression of deep malice upon him, and a ponderous clenched fist held threateningly near his face, as the horrible gazer muttered between his forcibly closed teeth.

"I'll pay you your wages for this, young man! I'll reckon with you in a new fashion before long! You shall repent this night to the last end of your life, that shall you! I could split your skull now, if you were not asleep. But you may rest this time!"

Saying which, he retired to bed. Immediately afterwards Miss Maria Sowersoft glided noiselessly in, with a huge basin of treacle-posset in one hand, and one of her own linen nightcaps, which she had been heating by the fire, in the other. This lastnamed article she at once proceeded to place on Sammy's head, and tie under his chin; because the long tabs with which it was supplied, would cover his bruised face much better than any cap of his own. As Colin glanced from under the clothes he

could scarcely forbear laughing, in spite of his fears, at the odd combination which his mistress's Cupid suggested,-of a coppercoloured, black-bearded face, with the primly-starched, snowy frillings of a woman's nightcap.

"Is he asleep, Sammy?" asked Miss Maria in a low whisper. "A deal faster than he deserves to be," replied that worthy. "I will just step across, and see," observed the lady; and accordingly trod lightly over the floor in order to assure herself of the fact. Colin's closed eyes, his silence, and his quick full breathing, confirmed her in the pleasing delusion; and she returned to Palethorpe's bedside, and deposited herself in a chair with the remark that, under those circumstances, she would sit with him a few minutes. As she gazed with admiration on the uncouth countenance of Palethorpe, set, like a picture, in the white frame of her own cap; and watched him deliberately transfer spoonful after spoonful of the posset from the basin into the ill-shaped hole in his own face, she heaved a profound sigh, which seemed one moment to inflate her bosom like a balloon, and the next to collapse it again as closely as poor Cocking's parachute. Palethorpe went on with his posset.

"Ay, dear!" she sighed again.

"What's amiss, meesis ?" asked Sammy as soon as the emptied basin left him at liberty to speak.

66

Nothing, Sammy,-nothing. Ay, dear! I'm quite well, as far as that goes," replied Miss Maria very despondingly. "But you have summat not right, I'm sure," persisted he. "Oh, it is of no matter!" she sighed again.

"But, what is it?" he a third time asked.

"It does not signify much," she again remarked; "it will be all the same a few years hence."

"You've tired yourself to death with that mangle, I suppose?" said Sammy..

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed in a tone of voice which betrayed some slight offence at the vulgarity of his suggestion; "it is a very different sort of mangle to that. I am sure I am mangled enough by people's indifference."

'Why, as for that," replied Sammy, trying to exculpate himself from any charge of neglect, "you are meesis of th' house, and don't want to be pressed to your meat and drink like a visiter."

"Meat and drink!" she exclaimed, as though indignant that such animal ideas should degrade the present elevation of her soul, "I care nothing about meat and drink, not I. You seem as if you could see nothing, though people make the plainest allusions that female propriety considers decent for any woman to do."

Mr. Palethorpe looked astonished as he observed,

66

Well, I'm sure, meesis, you can't say that ever I made any allusions to female propriety."