ence so dearly, that I should be glad to help him to get his cheaply."

"Mr. Gibson, you are as dark as the Sphinx."

Possibly, my dear. But time is the great discoverer of riddles; and therefore that my present riddle has something to do with a clock, is all in your favour."

And Mr. Gibson did not prolong the conversation. Only his wife observed, that as he laid his head back on his couch, he muttered to himself, in an amused tone, Talleyrand's never-to-be-forgotten injunction,

"ET SURTOUT, MON AMI, POINT DE ZELE!"

CHAPTER IV.

NATURE DISPLAYED.

"Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back." King Henry IV., Part I.

PEOPLE must go to bed, for even the most indefatigable grow fatigued sooner or later. The Rev. John Smith himself could not keep up his energies without sleep, though in the very midst of his slumbers he contrived to get through a good deal of work. Many were the castles which he built in the air while he lay dreaming, and perhaps, good reader, they were not more unsubstantial than some of your own waking edifices. Even Mr. Smith, however, needed rest for his body, if not for his mind. He had risen in the small hours of the day on which he had started for Cumberworth, and the small hours of another day had commenced before he took himself to repose in his new lodgings.

Good Mrs. Gibson would have detained him at the Rectory, but he was resolved to establish himself at once in his new home; and so, with as much luggage as he could carry, he sallied down the village-street in the dark, declining all proffered aid, resolved to find his way without assistance to his apartments at Mrs. Finch's.

It was that worthy lady's misfortune that she was what her neighbours called a very particular woman. She had been for many years the sole attendant of an aged gentlewoman, who, dying, bequeathed her the bulk of her property; but not before Hannah Finch herself was so far advanced in life as to have settled down into a very determined old maid. Upon this accession of fortune, Hannah returned to her native village; bought a house, and lived in it in solitary state, till Mr. Gibson induced her to take his Curate for her inmate, and so gave her what she sorely needed,— a little occupation. For hitherto, Hannah had chiefly spent her days in making her house a wonder of neatness, and in polishing up the old furniture which had descended to her as her mistress's residuary legatee.

The parlour which she then surrendered to the Curate had no very great charms about it; but it was Mrs. Finch's glory and joy. The view from its window was not particularly cheerful; glancing as it did over a scraggy bush of laurustinus to the row of white pales, which separated the good lady's domain from the turnpike road, and thence to a bit of dead wall, adorned with the remnants of decaying handbills and placards; a small pond, innocent of ducks, but covered with duckweed, completing the prospect which was not without its charms, however, for Mrs. Hannah; for, as she was wont to say, there was a deal of life going past her door every day; and though it was a rather dusty situa

tion, there was always a pleasant green about the pond. The parlour itself had a white dado, and a black skirting-board and doors; while that portion of the walls which was papered was covered with a design, in black and white on a grey ground, of those forked zigzags, interlaced and interlacing, which are wont to characterise the dazzles preceding a sick headache. There was a red, green, and blue Kidderminster carpet, in the most approved taste of that lovely fabric: a highly-polished diningtable, of nearly black mahogany six chairs of the same material with black horsehair seats, and an article of furniture covered also with horsehair, called by Mrs. Hannah a settee, and deemed, as she averred, by her late mistress too luxurious for the use of any but a confirmed invalid. But whether Mrs. Crakanthorpe had indulged herself during her decline by session or recumbency thereon there is, unfortunately, no evidence to show. A casual observer might be tempted to the too hasty inference, that if ever that lamented lady had lain upon it, she must have had the power of shutting herself up, like a pocket telescope, and that if she had sat thereon, it must have been straddle-legs. There was a cat on the chimney-piece in pasteboard and black velvet, with eyes of gold paper, and whiskers of pig's bristles, with a receptacle behind for allumettes, for which a substitute had been found in a bunch of quaking-grass. Also, there was at each end of the mantelpiece a shell-man, with a limpet on his head, and clothed in a suit of brown paper sprinkled with cowries. Such was Mrs. Finch's parlour, and so was it adorned with furniture, which was at once the pride and anxiety of her life: pride that she had such genteel property, anxiety that it should be kept in the highest state of preservation.

It was not without very considerable solicitation

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that she had been induced to receive a lodger. To be sure, he was a single man, and his being a young one made a great difference: she should have less difficulty in making him understand what was expected of him, for she had no notion of giving in to the whims of lodgers. Had he been a married man, she should have declined it. And as for children! always in mischief, meddling with everything, and breaking everything with which they meddle, Mrs. Finch candidly owned that at times she had great sympathy with good King Herod's infanticidal propensities. However, to oblige Mr. Gibson, she would accommodate Mr. Blandy for a month. And such a docile patient was Mr. Blandy, good, easy, shy, meek man, that he was her lodger for half a dozen years; and she almost broke her heart when, through Mr. Gibson's instrumentality, he was presented to a neighbouring vicarage, which I fully expect will one day be adorned with the Crakanthorpe furniture, and whatever else of worldly goods Mrs. Finch has to bequeath. But Mr. Blandy was broken in early. The very day after his arrival, instead of hanging up his hat on the peg in the passage, he was thoughtless enough to carry it with him into the parlour, and lay it on an empty chair. Mrs. Finch coming in with the coalscuttle, detected the impropriety in a moment, and clearing her throat very audibly, deposited the offending beaver on the floor. The unconscious Blandy, unobservant of the action, and unsuspicious of the hint, chancing to cross the room, stumbled over his hat, and replaced it on the chair. "You'll find your hat on its proper peg in the passage, sir," said the good lady, as entering with the dinnertray, she detected the second delinquency. If, instead of burying his nose in S. Chrysostom, Mr. Blandy had looked up, he would have read that in his landlady's face which would have roused him to

a sense of his enormities; but he read on, nothing heeding, and before that eventful day was over, he had actually laid his hat (and that hat damp with rain) on the polished mahogany table. Such an act was beyond human endurance. Mrs. Finch, without condescending to expostulate, carried off the cause of offence once more, and locked it up in a cupboard in her own sleeping apartment.

Meek, absent, Mr. Blandy! vain was your search next morning; hopeless your attempts to be positive where you had laid it. Had a thief stolen it out of the passage? Had you left it in a cottage, and walked home bareheaded through the rain? Neither was impossible. But the bell was tolling for a funeral, and the hat-the only hat you possessed-was not forthcoming.

"Mrs. Finch, have you seen my hat ?"

"Yes, sir," was the reply. "As you never put it in its proper place, and seemed at a loss to know what to do with it, I thought I had better take care of it for you. I dried it, sir, before I took it up stairs for it was so wet that it has almost ruined my poor table. You smell the bee's-wax and turpentine, no doubt," (the poor man had been ready to faint all the morning under its influence,) "but though I was slaving at it for an hour and a half before you were up, you see the mark; and there it will be for weeks to come."

From that scene of confusion and penitence, Mr. Blandy arose an altered man; and as he became the most considerate, so was he the most cherished of lodgers; and, as I have already said, I doubt not that "all the Finches of the grove," will be disinherited on his account.

To Mr. Blandy's old abode, Mr. Smith, with some little difficulty, and a trifling experience of the pond on the opposite side of the road, found his way, just as the church clock was striking ten.