his hands in the pockets of his corduroys, meditatively chewed a straw, and the bride-elect swung her crossed feet to and fro carelessly, now and again the distant gate. Ten minutes passed and the clerk came to the church door to inquire if the party were not ready. "E baint a-coom yet," replied Papa. "Be I to go and fetch 'e along?" What brought our excursions to a close | bearing gave any clue to the nature of was the dogmatic conscientiousness of the ceremony before them. Papa, with our steed; to pass, without halting, a gate at which he was accustomed to stop, was a breach of duty nothing would induce him to commit; and, as Mr. Marsh's customers in and about exchanging a word with the group at H are numerous, this unfaltering fidelity was trying. At first, indeed, we made light of it; enjoyed the astonishment of cottagers who came out to receive the loaves we had not brought, and lavished praises on the retentive The clerk approved; the proud parmemory of the pony. We humored ent shuffled off the tombstone and, adhim and treated his eccentricity with vancing to the churchyard gate, looked almost respectful indulgence. But up and down the road. The missing when, one very wet evening, we being link was not in sight, so, with an imhungry and late for dinner, the brute patient grunt, Papa turned in the direcinsisted on one or other of us getting tion of the White Hart. Presently he down and pretending to deliver bread returned, followed by a young laborer, at six different cottages in one half- whose delay was doubtless due to the mile of muddiest lane before he would difficulty he had found in persuading consent to proceed, we voted such nar-two double dahlias to stick in each row-minded intelligence a bore, and buttonhole. His appearance was gay, renounced carriage exercise thencefor- if not brilliant, but he kept any feelward. ings of enthusiasm he may have enI had always been under the impres-tertained under admirable control. sion that a village wedding partook of the nature of a rustic festival; that it was a pretty, pastoral scene, in which hearty rejoicing and floral display shed an appropriate halo over the union of the two fond hearts. Hence, when William one morning suggested that I should wait at the post-office and see the wedding about to be celebrated in the church just opposite, I congratulated myself on the opportunity and thanked the old man warmly for his notice. "They're to be married," said William, "at eleven o'clock; th' passon's awaitin' now." The hands on the black dial in the church tower already pointed to ten minutes past the hour, but, though a number of young people were lingering round the gate, there was no sign of the principals. "They be awaitin'," said William reassuringly. "That's hur and hur fa-arther in the ca-ahner. They be awaitin' for the groom." His finger directed my eye to a corner of the churchyard where, upon a flat tombstone, sat a young woman and an elderly man ; neither their dress nor Arrived at the church door, Papa paused, shouted "Hi!" to his daughter, and ushered the pair into the porch with his hat, much as though folding wayward sheep. The ceremony was soon over, and the last I saw of the wedding party was its procession in Indian file into the White Hart. There was a crude simplicity about the whole affair which was more original than attractive, and I am loth to believe it a representative example of a rural wedding. But, after all, when we lift a corner of the curtain which hides the homelife of the agricultural laborer, so prosaic an entry upon the married state appears only in harmony with the future. Are the clash of wedding bells and feasting of neighbors the fittest beginning for the new life of harder toil upon which he enters almost at the church door? No gentle gliding down the golden strand of "honeymoon " launches the hind upon the treacherous sea of matrimony. He goes to the altar to-day, and to-morrow's sun rises upon him trudging back to the fields to earn for two the bread it had been hard other such out-of-the-way village as enough to find hitherto for one. Work this and take the adult population man in which he can take no interest, alter- by man into confidential chat; much nating with idleness he does not enjoy, that now perplexes his political soul make up the sum of his colorless exist- will then, I warrant him, become plain. ence; but he asks no sympathy; his And now the day draws near when, world is bounded by the horizon, and for the second time, I am to leave my he is blind to all beyond the confines of nursery. The present fades out of sight his own parish. A rare visit to the a while, and I recall the last departure market-town and the half-yearly ap- hence, when strangers they told me pearance of the travelling cheap-jack, were my parents came to take me away. with his van-load of varied wares, form It is Sunday evening. I am in the his landmarks of time. Given enough vicarage garden saying good-bye to the to eat and drink, and a corner in the dog and cat overnight, lest I shall have White Hart on his missus's washing- no time to spare before the early start day, he is content. Knowing little he to-morrow morning. The exciting proswants little; and surely Wisdom on pect of a railway journey does little to ten shillings a week were Folly indeed. qualify the sorrow of parting from the In vain have I sought the agricul- animals, my tailless bantam and my tural laborer known to politicians own particular garden down by the that keen-eyed, intelligent man, whose pond. That I am to leave forever the rude eloquence contrasts so strangely kind old vicar and his daughter who with his untrimmed finger-nails and have been as parents to me is more patched pantaloons, and whose eager than I can realize. I am about to ness to discuss the Allotment Question leave the only "home" I have ever and beneficial legislation holds the known, and with a strange father and' sympathetic stranger spellbound on the mother; "life" lies behind; I know cottage doorstep. Perhaps H, in no farther future than to-morrow, and her lagging behind the times, is less it seems as though the end of all things advanced than other rural villages, for were come. I could not find that laborer, though I searched every heart pints of beer and pipes of tobacco could render accessible. Dubious nails and ragged pantaloons the bells are ringing for service, and there were in plenty; a sense that higher wages would be acceptable was universal; that farmers could not afford to pay more was almost equally widely acknowledged. But beyond the narrow boundary of these closely personal interests all was dense, impenetrable mist. I found no opinions," go in. advanced or otherwise; no eloquence ; not even a vague hunger for acres and cows. 66 Party government was no more Again it is Sunday and evening. I am standing on the same spot under the copper-beech on the vicarage lawn ; from the schoolhouse down the road AGO. The Bedtime; I must From Temple Bar. than a name to these contentedly unenlightened rustics; the colored litho- GLIMPSES BACK: A HUNDRED YEARS · graph portrait of the queen, which adorned many a cottage wall, embodied A LIBRARY is unlike every other the owner's idea of Authority, and the room in the house, not because it is existence of any other between her generally the most comfortable, and has Majesty and the landlord was a vague the sleepiest armchairs, nor because it fact, admitted only to be ignored. Let supplies you with "something" to any one who believes this a libel inves-read. The magazines of the month tigate for himself; let him go to some and papers of the day do that, not to speak of the weekly periodicals, which are so many. These all mainly tell us of what is going on in the world, and what our neighbors, friends, and enemies are thinking and saying about it. In them we look for the last jokes that have been made to make us laugh, the last murders that have been reported (with ingenuity of detail) to satisfy our natural appetite for the realistic, and there we skip or study speeches which have been delivered in order to make us agree with the speakers, or think for ourselves. shall have for supper, and ascertain whether our beds are properly aired. Thus throughout any researches into the past the little threads and fringes of life are ever showing themselves, and events which cast great shadows are accompanied by insistent daily needs, enjoyments, and vexations. But to return to our library. There is a shelf in mine which holds what was called the "New Annual Register." and I have just been taking down the volume which tells me what men were saying, doing, and thinking exactly one We get all this in any room where hundred years ago. Mighty things had the tables are supplied with what we freshly come, or were coming to pass call "current literature." But the in those days, including such as the walls of a "library" are more than French Revolution and the Indepenscreens to shut out the cold, and sur-dence of the United States, let alone round easy-chairs. thenes, the natural history of the beaver, the fifth satellite of Saturn, verses to a fly taken out of a bowl of punch (capital letters), with receipts for the making of cyder and the curing of hydrophobia. All these take up as much room as America, India, France, and the rest of the world. wars and rumors of wars in Europe, Every book-lined shelf is really a and what men then called "the East "curtain," through the chinks of which Indies." The record of these fills we may peep at the past, hear what about one-third of the octavo volume men were saying, and see what they under the title of "British and Foreign were doing in the years gone by. History," while another, headed "BioThere, too, we may behold great com- graphical Anecdotes and Characters," pleted clusters of history, and learn (if is a medley of papers, essays, reviews, we can) how events which have become | poetical and other extracts, and "Obturning-points in the world's course servations" on the "stile" of Demosarose, were carried on, and sometimes ended. We may perceive also that the greatest of these often hung on the smallest of nails, like pictures; and see how the mightiest impulses which have stirred mankind were accompanied throughout with a by-play of lesser incidents which go far to make up the pleasures and the pains of daily expe- Thus manifold tastes are suited, but rience. There never, indeed, was a it is from a large sheaf in the middle of time in which sugar was not sweet, the book that I would first pluck a few buttons did not come off, chimneys did stalks for my reader. It is called not smoke, and it was not difficult to" Principal Occurrences in the Year." find a piece of bread buttered on both These are not gathered from the sides. Probably some of the three hundred at Thermopyla had colds in their heads, and the " Decay of the Roman Empire" was surely accompanied by that of many Roman teeth. Gibbon does not notice this, but it concerned ancient citizens more personally" principal." I have sometimes wonthan the conduct of senates or Cæsars. Though the turning round of the earth is a mighty business, involving the order of creation and the existence of mankind, we have to think what we small fields of the United Kingdom alone. The whole world offers a harvest, and the reaper wanders over its surface cutting handfuls here and there from what seem to him the richest growths, and worthy of being called dered at the guiding motive of those chroniclers who pin an event to each day in our present common almanacks, and fill a space which might have served for the making of a memoran 66 which, says the narrator coolly, "seemed considerably to affect him." One might have thought his feelings had become blunted by that time, for this is how he was treated. dum with the statement that on such hint that there was any prospect of its and such a date "John Bright was general adoption. It was only ingenborn," or "Galileo died." Occasion- ious." Presently follows an account ally you come across a juxtaposition of the execution of one "Anckerwhich suggests a fitness in the se- stroem," who had assassinated his quence of events. The other day I Swedish Majesty. This reveals a hornoticed these immediately following rible bluntness of the age to the cruel-. announcements in a penny calendar. ties of punishment, being recorded "Martyrs burned at Oxford," "Fire without comment, except that the asInsurance begins." This was obvi- sassin was taken to the final place of ously unintentional, otherwise there execution "amid the hisses and hootwould surely have been more happy ings of the attending multitudes,” coincidences. But the choice of the historian who records the "Principal Occurrences " for a whole year in the "New Annual Register" indicates what would seem to be a curious paucity of news in the journals of the day, since Having been deprived of " his rights in his opening pages he gives equal of nobility, and of a citizen, with inprominence to "an extraordinary earth-famy," the night before, he "was conquake at Lisbon," the offering by the ducted to the Ritten-haus market, and pope of "a suite of superb rooms" in fastened by an iron collar upon a scafthe Vatican to "Prince Augustus, fifth fold during two hours, and afterwards son of his Britannic Majesty" (who whipped with a rod of five lashes, at a politely declined them), and the finding stake, where, under his name, with the. of "an enormous stone in the body of title of regicide added, was tied the pis-· tol and the knife, the instruments of: his crime. The same punishment was repeated on the 20th at the Hay-market, and the 21st at the market of Adolphus Frederic. Yesterday termi-, nated his existence on a scaffold erected in the great square. His right hand was first chopped off by the execu- · tioner, who immediately afterwards beheaded him, and then divided his body into four quarters, which are stuck up in different parts of the city." It is added that "At the commencement of his punishment he shewed much firmness, but his strength became exhausted from his sufferings; and he was dragged, being incapable of walk- : ing, to the places of punishment and execution." It was then that the a 66 cart mare at Colchester." This comes in the chronicle of January, which also immortalizes a certain " Mr. Smith" who was crushed to death in a crowd outside the Haymarket Theatre, and the humanity of the inhabitants of Hull, "which deserves to be recorded to their honor," since they collected 'fifty-six pounds" for the relief of a shipwrecked crew. More interesting is a glimpse of the rude condition of agriculture a hundred years ago. This is indicated by two announcements. The first records the invention of a machine," which is so simple, and so excellently contrived, that by one and the same movement it separates completely, and throws into different receivers, the heavy corn and the light." The other tells how "an ingenious people hooted (loyal subjects !), not at farmer," having cut the "tops and the hideousness of the spectacle, but at tails," stacked and thatched about "him." twenty loads of turnips, so that they were preserved from the frost, and "when opened," were found "perfectly sound and fresh," affording "an excellent fodder." This now common process was then hailed as a unique discovery, but the narrator does not be other than gratifying to his educated. And there is not a word in the nar- : rative of the registrar to indicate any perception on his part that the three: days' torture (for it was nothing less) of this criminal could be reckoned barbarous, or that the recital of it would 66 always impotent. Instances of longevity are of course duly recorded, and in one, that of "a little woman" who died in the hundred and fifth year of her age, it is mentioned that, "Some years before her death she had a new set of teeth." But it is not said whether these were provided by a dentist or by nature; if by the former, readers. Indeed, this" occurrence" is the day seem to have been almost recorded with evident satisfaction at the sense of just retribution which it revealed. The story of another follows, also illustrating the severity of punishment a hundred years ago. Some convicts who had escaped from Botany Bay in an open boat were captured after a miserable voyage of ten weeks and taken to England, but expressed a desire to suffer death rather was it to rank as a "principal occurthan be sent back to New South Wales.rence"? Those were the days of damages for In these days of rapid intercourse it libel, however. On the same page is is interesting to notice that the arrival the report of an action brought by a of "the Thames Frigate" off Portsyoung lady against the proprietor of mouth on April the 3rd, "with dethe Morning Post, Mr. Tattersal, a spatches from the East Indies," has a "horse-dealer," living in the Isle of paragraph to itself, she having sailed Ely, who (on that account) pleaded from "Tellicherry" the 28th of Deignorance of "what was going on in cember, and from the Cape the 2nd this great city," i.e., London. But of February. But these long postal "the jury brought in a verdict for the voyages lasted occasionally into the plaintiff — damages, £4,000." Then" fifties" of the present century. we have mention of one "Serjeant Take other entries which indicate Grant," whose sentence, for some social advance. In the report of the cause, was mitigated," and instead of House of Commons on the number of his having a "thousand" lashes, he debtors in different gaols (the total was let off with "fifty," which he re- number was 1,957), it appears that ceived "on the parade at St. James'.""one Gaskin," a leather-dresser, had The mention of the original punish-been confined eleven years for a debt ment ordered is, apparently, incidental. of "five shillings" in the county gaol The point in the "occurrence" is the at Worcester. This was hard lines, but mitigation of his sentence. Public not to be compared with the sufferings whipping, however, was by no means of some negroes, next recorded, as reserved for military offenders. Two thus (without comment): "Barbadoes, Occurrences "in the outskirts of this June 17. The King George, Howard same year are mentioned, one of which (was he related to the philanthroespecially involved a matter of "great pist ?), of Bristol, was lost about the importance to the public, who were middle of April to windward of this daily suffering under similar imposi- island. She had on board when she tions." A man had fraudulently ob- went on shore 283 men slaves, 261 of tained two shillings from a servant for whom were drowned in the 'tweenthe delivery of a parcel, and for this he decks, they being in irons, and the was sentenced to three months' im-gratings locked down. One old man prisonment, and then "to be publickly and a boy, being not well, and on deck, whipped from the Admiralty to Charing swam to shore, as did many of the Cross, and thence to Bridge Street, women, 87 of whom were sold here." Parliament Street." In the other case, Still there were not wanting some that of kidnapping a voter, the offender kindly disposed people in English sowas sentenced to be "whipped through ciety. The next paragraph tells us the streets" of Edinburgh, and then how when Lord Egremont's horse won Banished Scotland for seven years." £50 on the race-ground at BrightAmong the events mentioned, few helmstone," his lordship asked some are more frequent than fires, for the gentlemen who stood near him extinguishing of which the engines of"whether there was a Sunday School |