"Sir Fletcher Norton, at Durham, examined a sailor as a witness, who vexed Sir Fletcher by the manner and matter of his answers. 'Oh,' says Sir Fletcher, 'you affect to be a very clever fellow, quite a wit.' 'To be sure I do,' says the sailor; 'I am a well-educated one.' 'You welleducated! why, where?' said Sir Fletcher; 'where were you educated?' 'At the University,' said the sailor. 'University!' replied Sir Fletcher, 'at what University could you be educated?' 'Why,' said the sailor,' at the university from which you were expelled for your impudence-Billingsgate."

66 Serjeant Davy had a very large brief, with a fee of two guineas only on the back of it. His client asked him if he had read his brief. He pointed with his finger to the fee, and said, 'As far as that I have read, and for the life of me I can read no further.""

"An attorney in Dublin having died exceedingly poor, a shilling subscription was set on foot to pay the expenses of his funeral. Most of the attorneys and barristers having subscribed, one of them applied to Toler, afterwards Lord Chief Justice Norbury, expressing his hope that he would also subscribe his shilling. Only a shilling,' said Toler, 'only a shilling to bury an attorney? Here is a guinea: go and bury one-and-twenty of them.""

"This gentleman [Mr. Jekyll, one of the most celebrated wits at the bar], in his practice as a common lawyer, was very successful, as many

others have been, in diverting the attention of jurymen at county assizes from thinking seriously in serious proceedings, by introducing observations and jokes, tending to turn all that was passing into the ridiculous. I went his circuit as a judge, when I was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. There was a trial before me, I think in Somersetshire, of a prisoner for a riot. There were several questions asked by Jekyll and the counsel for the prosecution (Jekyll being counsel for the prisoner) as to the number of persons that composed the body of rioters. This species of questioning appearing to me to go to unnecessary lenght, I interposed by saying, 'Mr. Jekyll, is it not sufficiently proved that there were more than three persons? Now, do not three constitute enough in number as to matters of riot?' 'I beg your Lordship's pardon,' said Jekyll; 'the case has not been fairly, candidly, and fully opened to your Lordship and the jury. They have not told you and the jury that the rioters were all tailors; and I therefore confidently submit to the jury, that in this particular case they must prove that there were present at least nine times three, at least twenty-seven, though three men, not tailors, might be enough.' This tickled the fancy of the jurymen, made them laugh heartily, and though the case grew serious, they did not grow serious, and acquitted the prisoner."

WILHELM THE KNIFE-GRINDER.

"KNIVES to grind!" cried Wilhelm, as he limped through the streets of Brussels, driving his old crazy machine before him. "Knives and scissors to grind!" Wilhelm did not limit his trade to the grinding of knives and scissors exclusively; he would not refuse to put an edge upon a butcher's cleaver, and he was even very thankful to obtain a hatchet to reduce to chopping acuteness, but he only cried "Knives and scissors to-grind," as has been the custom of itinerant cutlers since the days of Cataline. Wilhelm drove his machine before him very slowly, and he perhaps required to do so, as it was rather fragile in its constitution; but he called "Knives to grind" with a lusty, cheerful, happy voice, that seemed to belie his own constitution; for he, too, like his precursor combination of beams, and stones, and wheels, was none of the most robust of creation's works. He was a little, ragged, lame, and feeble Fleming, with an old and well-worn grinding-wheel as his only property; and anybody particular in affinities would have said they were made for each other.

Wilhelm's face would have been notified merely as "a face," by a passer by. Any one would have been satisfied at a glance that it was deficient in

none of the constituent parts of the human visage; but the thought of whether it was beautiful or ugly, would never have intruded itself amongst his impressions. His large, old, broad-brimmed hat was slouched over his back and shoulders, and threw a deep shade upon his brow; and then, again, his thick black hair clung in large curls down his pale cheeks, and also partly obscured his features; so that Wilhelm's countenance was not put forward to advantage like those of the bucks who promenaded the Boulevards, and therefore it might be full of hidden beauties for aught the world knew. His well-patched blouse hung loosely round his spare form, investing it with even more than its own due proportion of apparent robustness; but poverty's universal and palpable mantle hung over him all, with a truthful tell-tale earnestness of whose reality there could be no mistake. In this guise Wilhelm limped along then, crying out for customers, and looking sharply about him for the same. He would turn his glancing eyes to the high windows of the quaint wooden-fronted houses, from which pretty damsels were looking into the street, and then he would look earnestly at the portly merchants who leant lazily over their half doors; but, though neither dame nor burgher would pay any attention to him, Wilhelm would still jog on and shout as gaily as if he were a wildbird uttering his accustomed cry.

It was through the lower or Flemish part of the

city that the knife-grinder pursued his slow and devious course, and either mantua-making and knifeusing were at a discount, or all these utensils had been in good repair in that quarter, for poor Wilhelm had little, save the echo of his own cry from the throat of some precocious urchin, for his pains.

Up one street went Wilhelm and down another. He often rested in front of the great Church of St. Gudule, and looked admiringly at its architecture, for he had a strong love for the beautiful, although he was only a knife-grinder; and sometimes he would seat himself upon the handle of his machine, in order to contemplate the outward grandeur of the Hotel de Ville; but if any one had supposed that there was one envious thought in all his contemplations, he did the knife-grinder injustice, for no envy had he, poor though he was.

To those who knew all about Wilhelm, there was nothing more incomprehensible in the world than his lightness of heart. That he should sing, was one of the most startling of anomalies-he, whose father, the fireman, perished in trying to rescue his own wife and Wilhelm's mother from the flames of his burning home. It was often said by those who saw the knife-grinder's ever-cheerful aspect, that he might think of his father and mother, and if nothing else could remind him of them, surely his own lameness might; for it was upon the night when they perished that he was afflicted, and yet he didn't seem to think so.