And such a marriage it was! No nonsensical parade-no affected postponement-no driving away to spend some time out of the sight and hearing of their friends. No!-the Wednesday after the fair was named for the wedding, and publicly announced in the village, and we all thought that we had not only a right, but that it was our bounden duty to be present.

On the morning of the wedding Nehemiah and Kesiah walked to the altar, accompanied by every one of their respective families, and followed by the entire of Our Village, man, woman, and child, that was able to walk. We considered it a holiday, and we made it a feast.

After the ceremony we all accompanied them back to the house of Adonijah Shufflebotham, and there the whole multitude pronounced a loud and a fervent blessing upon them, and departed.

Such was their wedding, and they were blessed-blessed in their fortunes, for they have been prosperous—and in their family, for they have children, who are virtuous and properous also.

Adonijah Shufflebotham and Icha

bod Wragg lived several years after that, and saw their children and their children's children flourishing about them, and at length sank into the grave, full of years, and carrying with them the respect and the reverence of their survivors-a proof that although a man may commence life in error, he may, by the Divine assistance, terminate it satisfactorily.

Nehemiah and Kesiah are still living, though life is with them getting into the sere and yellow leaf. Nehemiah has partly retired from active business, in order to make way for his sons.

.

In the mean-time the prosperity of the two families of Shufflebotham and Wragg has gone on increasing, and various intermarriages have taken place amongst them, so that they have, in more respects than one, become one united family.

The prosperity of Our Village has gone on in the same ratio, and many improvements have taken place. Our Village is made the centre of a parish by Act of Parliament, and we have only just escaped being made a borough.

Our trade and our manufactures have increased; we have lighted our streets with gas, and we intend to lay down a railway to connect us with some important place; but we cannot at present make up our minds as to the particular place with which we will be connected.

In the midst of our prosperity and our change there are very few now left who know any thing, even by tradition, of the origin of Our Village; and as the writer of this considers himself to be nearly the last possessed of that information, he has thus recorded it for the benefit aud edification of the future generations who may become Our Village's inhabitants.

MY DEAR ALPHONSE,

I HAVE several hundred times repented of my promise to tell you all I shall have heard, felt, and understood during the London "glorious days" of June; so fortunate a companionship for our three "glorious days" of July. However, I at length have braced up my indolence for the task, and if you find it intolerable, ennuyant, detestable, &c., let yourself and your importunity bear the blame. In revenge, I shall tell you every thing as it occurred, every thing as I saw it, every thing that came before me, new, odd, or extravagant, in a scene which was new even to the English, and in a country where every thing was new to your very diligent, very devoted, and, at present, very much tired friend.

Cards for the ceremony of the young Queen's putting on the diadem had been sent to the ambassador for distribution among us. But, as it was left to our own choice to use them or not; as I had imbibed an alarming idea of sitting for twelve mortal hours in a cold cathedral, larger than Notre Dame, and as (you will own the final reason to be irresistible) I had been strongly tempted by the beautiful Lady B- to solicit the ambassador for one of his tickets, and had failed, I was only too happy to lay mine at the lady's feet, and trust to my own in the streets for the day.

To acquaint my inexperience with the locale, I walked down the principal avenues which the programme marked for the procession a couple of days before. This was the 26th of June, the day first appointed for the ceremony. But the Tories, who assist the Cabinet in all cases of difficulty, and settle the affairs of the Government on all occasions at their will, assisted them on this, and ordered that they should postpone the procession till the 28th, thus saving them from one of the sullen and rainy days of the season, and appointing one of the finest in its stead. In Paris we have a good

London, June 26.

deal of the advantages of an Opposition, but the English are our masters in politics still, and it will be long before ours can bespeak sunshine and settle the weather.

One of the things that struck me most on my first arrival in London was the immensity of the multitude, and its perpetual action. I involuntarily asked myself a hundred times, where do all these people come from? how do they exist? or what business is it that keeps them in this eternal movement? The idea of any one's hiring a couple of straw chairs and sitting down to look round him, in one of the streets, probably never came into the head of any individual of the million and a half who rush hourly along the tide of life in London. Even the coffeehouses have no idlers gaping round the doors, or sipping ices and lemonade within. All is done as a matter of business. There are even no idlers in the Parks, the Tuilleries and Champs Elysees of this monstermetropolis. There the passengers are as much in motion as every where else, and except at the hour when the world of fashion ride for an appetite before dinner, there is no promenade. Sunday makes a distinction, but then the Englishman walks, only because he has nothing to run after. In short, London is as unlike Paris as possible -a vast locomotive engine.

But for the week before the coronation the crowd was overwhelming; the provinces poured their flow into the capital, the coaches and diligences from the country were packed up with men, women, and children, like waggons with bales and boxes; they were huge beehives flying at the rate of ten miles an hour. Steam-boats, railroads, canals, all were in activity, and all pouring the country population into the streets. It was calculated that they added nearly half a million to the daily numbers of London.

Though it rained, blew, and gloomed with what Voltaire called the "usual

severity of the English summer," I amused myself for a while by looking at the progress of the preparations. The English are not so expert at turning cities inside out as we are. And Paris would have been converted into a city of bandboxes, or have exhibited a hundred palaces of lath, tapestry, and painted calico fit for as many Emperors; or have run up a dozen amphitheatres of Titus, with all their flags, embroidered canopies, and all the lions and tigers of the Jardin des Plantes gamboling in their arenas, before John Bull was able to disfigure one of his old brick-built streets. But it was done at last; and by the help of planks, enough to have stripped a Norwegian forest of all its pines, of vast quantities of canvass and calico, and of zealous carpentering for a week together, London began to look unlike itself, and like a Continental city on a fête day. This finery made it look odd, without making it look gay. The nature of the place predominated over the powers of the brush and the hammer.

Your friend Charles D. and I employed ourselves in imagining what the venerable city of rost bif and smoke most resembled in its new costume and its ancient gravity. He said that it was most like the Boeuf Gras, that most honest of beasts, and most capital specimen of its kind, covered from horn to hoof with ribbons and garlands, yet seeming utterly regardless of the honour, and going through the show with all the original seriousness of his character. Another suggestion was that of a company of the Banlieu preparing for a review in the Champ de Mars; the gentlemen of the trowel, the forge, and the milk. pail, adopting the sword, the sash, and the shako, and marching to the sound of trumpet and drum with the dignity of Sunday saviours of their country. Or, most questionable and flattering of all, our venerable and excellent acquaintance, Madame La Contesse, investing herself with the costume of that fairest of the fashionable, and most fashionable of the fair, that pride of ambassadresses, Madame De Hon, and forgetting the fifty years interval between her and beauty, going to a fancy ball at the Tuilleries in silk-web draperies and silver wings, as Psyche. Such was our contrivance for escaping the recollection that we were walking

through some of the heaviest showers that I have seen even in this showery country.

Still the carpentering, the nailing up of canvass, and the torrents of rain went on with equal activity. The sulky-looking streets were rapidly transforming into the look of a vast booth at a vast fair, and it wanted nothing but the canals, we had water enough, and the masquers, to imagine ourselves a thousand miles from the huge city of London, and preparing for the carnival in the Piazza di San Marco, in Venice, the lovely, the delicious, and alas! the dying.

A large party at the hotel of the embassy. The Marshal's arrival has been the signal for throwing off that intolerable darkness which seems to be the etiquette of ambassadorship in this region of tempests. The people are, like their climate, calm, of the most overwhelming calmness, and to be roused by nothing but a war or a revolution. Since I have come here, the spirit of the season, or the country, had sunk me at least fifty degrees in the thermometer. The mercury rapidly approached zero. What was to be done, where a ball scarcely once a month, a drawing-room scarcely once a quarter, and the closed windows and doors of every embassy for six months in the year together, made life one long funeral procession? In Paris, under such circumstances, we should have an emeute, nothing else could restore the circulation of the blood. In Italy we should go upon the .stage. In Vienna we should smoke opium and swallow sour-krout. In Stamboul we should break into the Harem, or take the Grand Turk by the beard; any thing either to extinguish our sensibilities, or to stimu late them. But here the English are a provident nation. Till my residence at the embassy I did not perceive the use of their multitude of canals! But the Marshal's ambassadorship-extraordinary has promised us a change; saved your friend from the necessity of plunging himself and his crimes together into the bottom of one of these watery receptacles for attachés tired of life, and saved you from receiving as a last legacy my opera-glass, the payment of my debts, and the honour of discharging my pension to instead of these little despatches from the very

I went last night to see the "Coronation." This, too, twelve hours before its existence. But I hate to be taken by surprise in any thing, and as one of the suburb theatres exhibited all the glories of English royalty in advance, I ordered my cabriolet, and enjoyed its trumpets, drums, huzzas, and horses, by anticipation. Nothing could be more loyal and laughable. The house, perfectly suburban, a phrase which, as you have no such idea in Paris or any where else on the continent, implies at once showy and squalid, tremendous dancing, and sometimes very pretty figurantes actors; every thing that is outrageous, and audiences good-humoured à l'outrance, grumbling only when they insist on the encore of some song, which would break the voices and the hearts of all the Italians on earth, and bursting out into laughter in the very depths of melodrame.

I went to bed with my eyes full of stage-lights, tinsel, and odd faces, and dreamed that I was ambassador-extraordinary on a mission to marry the daughter of the great Mogul by proxy to the Emperor of Mexico. A shower of diamonds was poured upon me by the magnificent father-in-law, and, choking with brilliancy, I woke, and found my valet standing, coffee in hand, by my bed-side, and shaking me from my slumber, to say that it was five in the morning, and all the world was up!

As it was not well to continue in rear of all the world, I rose, and after despatching the trivialities which make us fit to mingle in the presence of our fellow men, I went to look for the house of our friend D, if, with its new gown and petticoat of calico, and mask of planks and paint, I should be able to recognise it again. My valet had told me truth, but he had not told me the whole truth.

The

day had begun with gloom, the gloom soon deepened into rain, and all

June 28.

threatened wofully for the canvass houses, and for the fair myriads who were so soon to take up their abode in them. But all London set the elements at defiance; all was in motion; the principal streets were a perpetual line of life, a gulf-stream of man, woman, and child, all hurrying in the same direction towards the west. The movement was almost à Corso, with carriages crowding after each other and flying along, filled with women fashionably dressed; here and there an officer of rank enjoying the luxury of a whole vehicle to himself, and looking contemptuously enough on the pedestrians on the trottoir. But, except for the crowd, the streets looked as gloomy as the weather; the shops were all shut, and as the shops form all the show of London, and as they are shut only on Sundays, or on the days of Royal funerals, coronations being rare visitants, a stranger suddenly dropped on this globe of ours would have had only his choice of conjecturing that the middle of the week had suddenly jumped back to the beginning, or that there was a new hiatus in the House of Hanover.

But, when I reached the scene of the royal programme, the gloom was all past. Round me were the faces, the bonnets, the hats, and the clamours of at least a hundred thousand people. From the spot where the bronze statue of the first Charles looks down the vista, at whose end he lost his head, all before me was a sea of heads and all in full motion. Some taking their places on the scaffoldings raised in front of the houses; some mounting the posts of the gas lamps, which then bore the true illuminations of the age, whatever might be the state of their coats and breeches; some fixing themselves steadily in positions on the trottoir, with the desperate determination not to be unfixed for four or five solid hours; and others, like myself, elbowing their way through the mul

titude to the houses where their places had been kept. Whatever Charles and his charger might have thought of the vista, to me it was remarkably lively. As far as the eye could glance all was a succession of waving banners, the flags of every nation, and of none, hung out from balconies; scaffold above scaffold, looking in the distance like vast tents, of every colour of the rainbow; the roofs of the houses crested with groups of gathering spectators, which, still rather scattered, and looking loungingly below, might at that distance have been taken for scattered statues. At that moment, too, a regiment of heavy cavalry entered the street, to take up its place in the procession; and the glitter of their brass helmets, their scarlet coats, and the prancing of their handsome horses, gave the mass exactly the relief which the eye of a painter would have desired. The sun, too, threw in an auspicious burst, and the long column of the cavalry under it looked like a stream of fire working its way through a stubborn and sullen-coloured soil.

We Frenchmen have heard so much of the buffalo spirit of John Bull, that I had prepared myself for a tough struggle. But I made my way with tolerable ease, neither fought, nor was challenged to the combat ; was neither trampled to death, nor called a frog-eating villain for not having English for my mother tongue. On the contrary, I escaped without either proving my heroism or being forced to deny my country. Frenchman as I was I passed on, saw every thing that I wanted to see; went every where, during the day, where I wished to go, and preserved my limbs and my conscience entire, till I took them both with me to bed.

My first movement had all the precipitation of fear. D's house was at the bottom of the immense cul de sac before me. I feared for my place, my breakfast, and my corporeal existence. I plunged on accordingly. But I reached our friend's with such comparative ease that, like all who are alarmed without cause, on getting rid of my alarm, I adopted the peril ous course of leaving my proper balcony, and again returning into the crowd, and seeing all that was to be seen before the arrival of the pageant.

Yet I had some compunctions on

the subject. You know D--'s hospitality. On this day it shone. His English father gave him the taste for pieces de resistance, solid masses of every thing eatable which distinguishes the native of this country. His French mother gave him the propensity to enjoy every thing enjoyable, which follows the native of ours every where, from Paris to Kamschatka. His house to-day was a complete refectory. Its tables would have made one of the fathers of the Chartreuse break his vow of eating nothing but pulse, or have satisfied the superb longings of a cardinal. They were piled with such luxuries as London can muster; I admit, not such as the Paris cuisine would produce to be proud of, but very well notwithstanding. We first had been summoned to breakfast. The English, it must be acknowledged, breakfast well. They even exhibit some taste in the arrangement. Other nations overload the table, or starve the sitters. In England there is the happy medium. Tea, coffee, toast, and eggs, with a few slices of ham, intermixed with wings of chickens, form the juste milieu. All beyond spoils the appetite, occupies attention, and degenerates into dinner. As for us, Frenchmen never breakfast, except where we take our chocolate in a caffe. the ladies never make their appearance in the morning, and as we never do any thing without them, our mornings pass in picking our teeth, tying our neckcloths, and calculating when we are to dine. The formality of breakfasting is therefore out of the question.

As

At the tables was another feature equally novel to a Frenchman, and captivating to all the world. Between forty and fifty ladies, generally young, for the matrons had probably been scared by the prospect of an ultrasqueezing; generally pretty, all very handsomely costumed, and all in full smiles, sat down to the table. The gentlemen at first did themselves the. honour of supplying those fair creatures with all that was necessary for their appetites, whose delicacy, fine and fashionable as it was, was not altogether proof against the singularity of rising at six o'clock instead of noon, and of inhaling the morning air instead of the midnight fluvia of the ball