believing it to be a waste spot, but I now find I must become the tenant of your surviving parent. What does she expect for it?' That,' said Edward, she is satisfied to leave to your lordship. We are confident that the chief lawgiver of our country will do what is just and right.' You shall not be disappointed, young man,' replied the chancellor. I was offered a site for my palace, equally eligible, at a yearly rent of four hundred pounds. That sum I will pay your mother, and have it properly secured to her heirs for ever.' Edward thanked his lordship, and respectfully withdrew. Before a week had elapsed, his mother was established in a neat and comfortable dwelling in one of the suburbs; and ere two had gone by, sweet Lucy (no longer Gray) might be seen in the sunny little garden filling a basket with the fruit of a golden pippin-tree, which the old lady pronounced to be almost as fine as the apples which his gracious majesty King George II. was wont to select from her stall at Hyde Park Corner. And thus it came to pass that the stately mansion of England's warrior-duke is subject, at the present day, to a ground rent of four hundred pounds a-year, payable to the representatives of the old applewoman. RECOLLECTIONS OF SARDINIA, In the year 1847, the Mediterranean is covered with steamboats: the united genii of steam and wind hurry forward the traveller for business or pleasure with absolute certainty to his destination, and without his being obliged by the way to dispense with either a good dinner or a clean bed. But ten years ago, men and things in the south still went on in their old way. Steamboats were then confined to the line between Marseilles, Malta, and Constantinople; and the communication between the outlying ports and islands was still kept up principally by small half-decked sailing-boats, lateen-rigged, and from thirty to forty tons burden, the passengers by which found their own provisions, and for bed and accommodation got on as they could-that is to say, very badly. The variable winds of the Mediterranean often made this mode of transit a great trial of patience; but it was the very best way to see and study the magnificent coast scenery. From the exceeding depth and transparency of the atmosphere, the mountain back-grounds in the interior, at the distance of very many miles, stand out startingly near and distinct to the eye, forming, with the infinite sea, the framework to a landscape which every change of the bark, as it creeps by the shore, constantly varies and renews, while it gives time enough for each characteristic curve and blending of the sea and land to impress itself unchangeably on the memory. The steamboat traveller goes straight to his point; but he sees nothing of this. Comfort and expedition are his object, and he obtains them; but it is at the expense of all the essential beauty of the voyage. We embarked at Bastia in the felucca Giustina, on the second day of July, and it was the ninth before we reached Cagliari in Sardinia, a distance of three hundred miles; for during half the time the air was motionless, and we lay roasting on the smooth swell of the Mediterranean under an almost vertical sun. Every afternoon, about four o'clock, it lightened, but without thunder; and from this the horizon was in a blaze till sunset, when short interrupted squalls came on with rain, and lasted till midnight. On the evening of the seventh day, we brought to in the magnificent bay of Cagliari, among a fleet of fishing-boats. It is worth a week's confinement on board to feel the rapture of exchanging the eternal pitching and rocking of a small vessel for the motionless earth, especially when one has been living in the midst of dirt indescribable, on hard pears, indigestible fowls, garlic, and ship's biscuit. Our hotel, when we reached it, was anything but a palace-a stone edifice of two storeys in height, very large and dirty, built in a square, with a court in the middle, and galleries all round the sides. On the left, as we entered, was a large hall, like the salles in France and Belgium, with great heavy blinds at one end that admitted air, but no light; and at the other end an open staircase, inlaid with some kind of yellow wood, leading to offices and bedrooms. The ball was full of men, short, mahogany-coloured, and with faces half-buried in hair, with here and there a naval or military uniform among them, seated in groups at little round tables, smoking, gaming, and drinking wine and lemonade. We took some wine, and went to bed, being very tired, where we managed finally to sleep in spite of the noise, which seemed to go on just the same all through the night. Cagliari, like most Mediterranean towns, is striking without, and infamous within. An amphitheatre of houses sweeps round the bay, tier rising over tier about two-thirds up the sides of a conical hill, four hundred feet high, very glorious to the eye, but very tiring to climb. Within, the streets are narrow and mean, paved with small pitching stones, set obliquely with the points turned upwards; at every third or fourth house a clothes-line dangles with linen hung out to dry, the only sign of washing observable during our stay, for the dirt is universal, and surpasses language to describe. A traveller fresh from home is struck with the completely Italian look of the place: the houses lofty, and with colonnades, the shops full of garlic, sausages, and little figures of saints. There are several remarkably handsome churches, crammed full of votive offerings. There is a spacious cathedral, with a façade composed of solid slabs of white marble; and another, nearly as large, having a multitude of side chapels, one of them illustrious in the island for a giant picture of Antichrist and his followers, represented in the various shapes of dogs, wolves, and bears, among whom Luther, Beza, and Calvin figure conspicuously. But these stately edifices add little to the general effect, being built up with the meanest class of shops reared against their sides; nor are they such as would attract much notice among the like kind of structures on the conti. nent. The real interest of a city like this lies in its men and women. In Sardinia, every one wears a different dress, according to his district. The people of Cagliari dress differ ently from those of Sassari; the natives of the highlands from those of the lowlands; the peasantry of one parish from those of the next. Compared with our own sobervested population, among whom every male above the rank of a labourer wears a frock-coat and round hat, a town like this looks like a tulip bed. Some of the men wear a large hat, with a party-coloured handkerchief bound tight round the head, the corner hanging down behind, and a close waistcoat of tanned leather folding on the breast, and reaching nearly to the knee. That huge swarthy fellow, with his bare neck burnt almost to a brick-dust hue with the sun, in a jacket of goatskin, and a highlander's bonnet covering his matted hair, has just come down from the mountains a dozen miles off, to sell his winter's store of wild-boars' hams in the metropolis, and is chaffering with a citizen in a flaming red bonnet, and black kilt falling gracefully over his scanty under-garments, and fastened at the collar with silver buttons. They have commenced amicably; but at each interchange their voices are getting an octave higher, and the highlander's hand is clutching mechanically at his knife. Standing in a group by themselves are a number of sturdy, thick-legged, mahogany-coloured mountain-women, loaded with fruit and vegetables: as they glance at the cloaked and hooded cittadini, what a pride they evidently feel in the contrast presented by their flaming scarlet stockings, and bright yellow cloth caps with scarlet borders, and immeasurably full petticoats starting forth with a swirl from the hips, like the pictures of our grandmothers when hoops were the fashion. The ladies dress in caps and bonnets here as elsewhere; but the citizens' wives goes, slowly sailing out of sight. For the next five hours we were trotting doggedly forward under a sickening heat, over an endless level of plantation and desert. Rich fields of olives and sugar-canes, with palm-trees thirty feet high, and other tropical productions, met us here and there; but the greater part of the ground lay uncultivated, though capable of anything. Everything was still, through the intensity of the heat; the very lizards were silent; and twice only we passed a solitary peasant. Once we came upon running water; a luxury indeed; and once we passed, at a short distance from the country-seat of some absentee noble, a huge building like a manufactory, with the ground cut up in plots to the very door, and the cow-pens placed right under the bedroom windows. The country still bore a very solitary aspect, until we turned sharply to the left, at the foot of a conical limestone bluff, and began to ascend by a paved road, cut in a zig-zag direction up the face of the hill. The spectacle from the top, stretching far and wide over the immense level we had just quitted, must ordinarily be very fine; but now, before us, and on either side, the vast plain of the Campidano lay literally steaming with heat, the mist floating palpably up into the transparent blue sky, and confusing everything to the distant Mediterranean, which was momentarily distinguishable by the flashes of sunlight reflected from its waves. As we looked, we could almost see the heat in the bottom, but now every step took us into a different country; and after half an hour's continuous mounting, we rode forth upon an upland plateau, with the short crisp turf under our feet, and heath flowers perfuming the fresh pure air of the hills. The vegetation here utterly changed; no more sugar-canes, plantains, and agavés, but plants of the north, beeches, ash, and evergreen oaks, with wild olive and cork-trees, sheltering a profusion of wild flowers and berries, especially a gorgeous strawberry of a deep orange colour. The peasantry, too, seemed altered for the better; blue eyes and fresh skins met us here and there, while down in the plains the men were short and thick-set, with large mouths and thick lips, black hair and eyes, and complexions like wash leather. The dress, too, was once more different. A peasant walking by my side-a gaunt, sinewy fellow, as upright as a dart, clad in dark-brown, with a sort of spiral cloth cap on his head-asked me if I did not admire a little girl, who was trotting before us, returning from some village fête, or more probably from confession. She was the daughter of some small farmer, and had on her best clothes-a complete suit of scarlet over a white petticoat flounced up to the knees, with long sleeves of scarlet cloth, down the sides of which were a double row of silver buttons, each as big as a crown piece: on her head she wore a triangular piece of scarlet cloth, tied down by a broad flame-coloured Accordingly, the next morning we were all prepared ribbon, and altogether looked like a bonfire. In this to set off. It was about four A. M.; we had packed up; attire, without either shoes or stockings, she was dancthe horses were all ready at the door, when the guide ing a-head at a great rate, occasionally turning round to absolutely refused either to start himself, or to allow his laugh at us with her wondering large eyes, as we plodded horses to start: first, because it was Friday; and, se- on through stones and brambles fetlock deep in mud. cond, because his dog had howled through the night! During the rest of the day we rode through an open This was too bad, when he had received the whole sum valley, enclosed by high lands; a sheet of the most gloagreed upon on the night before: but he was immov-rious vegetation, but the beauty of which was made terable for the time; and when, by threats and an addi-rible by the multitude of short wooden crosses at every tional carolinus, he was obliged to give in, an hour was already lost. The morning was dark, damp, and dreary, and a thick mist, full of all kinds of fever and malaria no doubt, hung over everything. The road first wound along the margin of the bay, and then diverged inland, running along the top of a causeway, between two great stagnant ponds, half mud, half water, steaming with malaria vapour. Gradually, the sun came out, and roused up an army of waterfowl, which passed us with a loud plash, and after them a band of scarlet flamin A week was quite enough to give to Cagliari during the malaria season, when everybody that could do so was away and in the mountains. We paid our bill, after first having to resist and overcome the customary Italian propensity to overcharge; and after a similar conflict, succeeded in settling upon reasonable terms for the hire of three mules and a guide to take us across to Palmas, where our boat was sent round to meet us. * In Sardinia, called the launedda. It is made of three short pieces of wood, of unequal length, and for harshness surpasses any bagpipe. turn and nook, marking the scene of some deed of blood committed or attempted. At the close of the evening we entered a dark tree-shaded ravine, with a brawling brook rushing down the bottom, up which we threaded our way by a narrow road scarped out of the red earth of the hill-side; and presently emerging at the upper end, came out at once into the main street of Teulada, where we were to sleep for the night. Teulada is a little out-of-the-way place, on a hill-side; but man's evil passions follow him everywhere, and even here, at the street end, was a freshly-constructed cross, commemorating, as we were afterwards told, a deed of peculiar atrocity. Two farmers of the neighbourhood, by names Alberto and Jacomino (literally, Little Jack), CHAMBERS'S EDINBURGH JOURNAL. or great offence would have been taken. The family slept on the floor; but we were allowed, out of special favour, to mount by a ladder into a wretched loft, swarming with fleas, musquitos, and worse, and full of broken furniture and earthenware, pans, pots, and sacks antiquated kind of packing - case, big enough for a of Indian corn; in one corner of which stood a huge dozen, and stuffed with leaves of Indian corn. This was the bed. About midnight it blew a tremendous storm of wind, with thunder and lightning, the hailstones, as big as eggs, battering on the roof like grape-shot; and when this was over, the cocks took up the tune, and crowed perseveringly till daybreak. had long been on bad terms, when they met by chance telling us he did so to avert the Evil Eye, which the at a country wake, quarrelled, fought, and were ulti- praise might otherwise bring upon it. Again, on remately reconciled with difficulty by the priest. Jaco-tiring for the night, we were obliged to kiss all round, mino soon after left the country. Thirteen years afterwards, when both were verging on old age, some unlucky words persuaded Alberto that his honour called imperiously for revenge. He traced his enemy from Cagliari to Sassari, from Sassari to Marseilles, from Marseilles back again to Sassari, and finally shot him from an ambush on the present spot. The victim died at once, two balls having passed completely through his body; and the murderer was seized and executed, most justly, within a month afterwards, glorying in the spirit with which he had worked out his revenge, and regarded by his countrymen as a kind of martyr. This horrid spirit of revenge is the curse of Sardinia. No education, violent natural passions, a bad religion, and the worst possible laws, with the greatest one-sidedness and venality we got up before dawn, and dressed the best way we As it was quite evident there was to be no sleep, in executing them, have here created a state of things could. Some wine and eggs were soon despatched, and which can only be realised by imagining the state of the in ten minutes more we were trotting out of the town, Highlands under the Jameses reproduced, with the added along a path so narrow, that the boughs met over our inflammation of an almost African sun. Throughout saddle-bows, through a grand ravine of crags and dells, the island, the cittadini or inhabitants of walled towns studded with woods of ilex, beech, cork, and wild olives, hold the contadini or villagers in utter contempt, which and seemingly swarming with game. Hares by dozens the latter very cordially return: the highlanders look ran across our path; quails and partridges swarmed in on the lowlanders as utterly degenerate, and beneath the bushes, with many gaily-painted natives of the themselves in being; besides which, the people of Cag-south, of which we did not even know the names. Preliari and Sassari have a standing hatred to each other. sently we came upon a huge old boar, lying meditating Many communes have been at feud with each other for by himself at the foot of a cork-tree; but we had barely centuries, and have entirely forgotten the original cause, if there ever was one. Every one goes armed to the jungle. The path continued to mount, holding more a glimpse of him, as he rose and trotted off through the teeth, and in consequence, in one year (1827) there were eight hundred and seventy-two assassinations in a po- at a little distance on our left, and grew narrower and to the southward over the hills, with the clear blue sea pulation of four hundred thousand. The murderers narrower, till at length it was barely possible for the generally fly to the mountains, and there become ban- mules to keep their feet. ditti-malviventi they are called-and in their turn, having no alternative, and were enabled, before the sun when the time comes, are hunted down like dogs by had reached the meridian, to look down upon the Bay We persevered, however, the regular troops. Lately, a disarming act has been of Palmas, where our little bark lay waiting our arrival, passed, which may do something; but the evil lies deep a solitary speck upon the waters of this magnificent in the misgovernment of centuries, which only centuries haven, which is capable of sheltering all the navies of can repair. Europe in its bosom. When we came into the town, we found it in terrible confusion. A great hunt was to take place in the neighbourhood on the following day, and the people for miles round had poured in, and were squabbling for OUR readers are aware that the strange thesis has been THE ARISTOCRACY OF NAMES. quarters in the streets. Our lodging, when we got one, maintained before now, that private vices are public was in the worst style a specimen of the wretched wine benefits;' and some may have wondered at the despeshops which it is the wanderer's lot to lodge in all over the south. The ground-floor consisted of one long room, serving for everything. In the centre of the room there simple rule of multiplication. But we live in a world of rate ingenuity which could work evil into good by the was a square hole in the clay floor, in which was the seeming anomalies; and however difficult their reconfire, but the smoke had no outlet except through the ciliation may be, there is no doubt that the errors of door. The floor was of clay; the walls of mud, with a individuals are overmastered in their collective tendency, stone bench along one side; in the one corner was a and that we all, good, bad, wise, and foolish alike, colarge hand-mill for grinding corn; on the floor stood musingly an ass, a calf, and two pigs; and on the afore-operate, unconsciously, in the great work of human said bench sat the family-the host, his wife, and a little boy-with sundry cocks and hens. The landlord and ourselves supped out of the same bowl; the hostess sat apart, women never being allowed to eat with the men in Sardinia. We had food enough, substantial, though coarse-fish, flesh, fried pigeons, olives, artichokes, and a platter of small white snails stewed, a dainty in this island-with plenty of strong country wine. The host himself was a good specimen of a Sardinian peasant rough, but kind, shrewd, and especially inquisitive. England he had heard of from a Highland officer of the Malta garrison, who had strayed into this secluded corner the autumn before for the sake of the shooting. He recollected his father speaking of Lord Nelson's fleet when it came to water in the Bay of Palmas; and he had some vague notion of our steam-vessels and railways; but nothing would convince him that Tughitterra (England) was not the capital of London. Some specimens of manners I recollect we had in the evening, more peculiar than pleasant. One of us praised the child, which was really very pretty: the father immediately spat in its face, and crossed himself devoutly, progress. losopher smiles at the enthusiasm of the vulgar in their As a familiar illustration of what we mean-the phiaspirations after an undefined and undefinable good they call the Genteel; but the philosopher may mile on, for the wisdom of the learned Theban is foolishness. Such aspirations are the beginning of all refinement. They lead, it is true, to the perpetration of innumerable caricatures; but these in time correct themselves, or are corrected by collision, till every day some individuals, rising gradually above the mass, ascend into the region of true taste—or what is taken for such by the present generation. And what is true of individuals, is true of nations, and of society at large. The history of mantory of virtue and intelligence. How many revolutions ners and costume, or, so to speak, Fashion, is the hishave we passed through, before reaching our present simplicity of attire! And how many horrors have we encountered, before subsiding into our present condition of comparative charity and peace! Our contemporaries are better, as well as better dressed, than their ancestors; and our posterity will be better, and better dressed, than ourselves. Already our women have more elegance, and less bustle; and already our men have grown ashamed of their pig-tailed coats, not a thread of which will survive for their heirs-at-law. Already, in like manner, do we begin to pick up little thieves and beggars from the streets, to imprison them in schools, instead of contaminating them in jails; to turn them to knowledge and industry, instead of confirming them in ignorance and crime; and to lead them on to public usefulness, rather than the hulks and the gallows. Condemn not, therefore, the vulgar-genteel any more than our ancestors, for, like the latter, they are pilgrims on the road, and their very errors are paths that lead to truth. their merits remain an impenetrable mystery. We were 'R. A.!' cried he. You may say that. Wasn't it after the gineral I Ralph Abercromby! Why did you not mention this before? And are you really off now-with a fortune in that name?' 'Sure it's time to be off, when I have paid the fare, and forgotten the rint? Bad luck to the name! If the initials brought us to this, wouldn't the rest of it have starved us entirely?' The man is an ass!' mused the publisher aloud, as our friend flung out of the shop. 'But Ralph Abercromby R! that name would have carried him through, if he had brayed worse than a donkey!' But there is one thing in the general bearing and tendency of the present age towards the Genteel which is a little puzzling-not that we think the thing unnatural or improper in itself, but we cannot well see in what way the result is to benefit society. Gaudy or ill-matched colours betray a mental struggle, which may end in advancing the individual in the path to taste; and a control, however rude, of the language and movements of the body, may in like manner result in an approach towards politeness. But of what utility in our social progress is the present chronic revolution in Proper Names? Suppose, for instance, the whole race of Smiths get on to writing their name Smyth, or even reach the ne plus ultra Smythe, cui bono? | Smythe is not intrinsically better than Smith; it is only more uncommon: and every advance the multitudinous tribe makes in this direction defeats its own object. If Smythe were a good, or a beauty in itself-if it were the beau ideal of Smith-that would be another thing; but it does not even make the name a dissyllable-it leaves it the same short, squat, ruturier word as ever. Nothing, in fact, can be done for Smith but giving it an amiable prename, or, better still, a title. Sir Sidney Smith, for instance, has a decidedly aristocratic sound; and this has no dependence upon its personal associations, otherwise Adam Smith would be recognised as the legitimate chief of the clan. Without a prename at all, Count Smith and Baron Smith, so common on the continent, are highly respectable; and if a suggestion had been adopted, which was kindly and happily made, on the occasion of the marriage of an Irish beauty of the name with a scion of Italian royalty, Smith would have become one of the most distinguished patronymics in the kingdom. The match alluded to was reckoned a mesalliance on the part of the lover, who was accord-your. ingly threatened to be discarded by his family; and he was therefore advised to confer upon the name of his lovely bride his own title, and call himself Prince Smith. But even a prename alone may be of great advantage. There is one of the novels of Miss Edgeworth-we forget which-in which a gentleman of the name of Harvey figures as the hero. Harvey! Only fancy John, Peter, or even William Harvey as the hero of a novel! But Miss Edgeworth was too well acquainted with the philosophy of names to commit such a blunder: she made the individual Clarence Harvey; and the name has never to this day been objected to even among the female teens. Our own attention was first attracted to the importance of names by the case of an adventurer in London whom we knew personally. He was a countryman of the Princess Smith alluded to, and had come up to push his fortune in the musical line. Being really a person of fair abilities, he obtained a few pupils, and had even a couple of little songs published by the musicsellers: but it would not do. He did not make enough to keep his family (for he had brought his wife and child with him), and when want began to stare them in the face and pinch too, as well as stare-he at length made up his mind, though with many bitter regrets, to go back to Connaught. What could he do? Nobody cared about songs by R. A. R- ; and to this day Sometimes it is considered advantageous to give one's name a foreign air; as if we were valuable exotics naturalised in the country, but still looking brown and yellow, as it were, in honour of our origin. Thus plain Miller is homely and sturdy (though not overly honest), till it is improved into Muller; but when this again becomes Mühler, it is quite a molendinary curiosity. We fancy Mr Mühler was some centuries ago Herr Mühler, and we long to ask him, When did you come over? This expression, by the way, come over, is very captivation. Some came over with the Saxons, some with the Normans-it matters little which the thing is to get back one's origin till it is lost in the morning twilight of history; and the breadth of the ocean counts to our imagination like an additional space of time. A foreign miller, besides, is a more poetical personage than an English miller. In England, gentry of this profession may be thieves (as it used to be the fashion to represent them), but abroad they are banditti; and in Germany, some of the wildest scenes that followed the Thirty Years' War were enacted in a mill. Most people, in fact, have a strong objection to names that are associated with the vulgarities of a common trade. An aspiring Mason, by simply doubling the s, so as to make himself Masson, laughs at detection; although a Tailor has less facility of escape-and more need of it. He tries Taylor, and probably shakes his head; then the other syllable, Tailour; and if still appalled by the horrors of the name, he makes it, as a last resource, Tail But there are other associations still more frightful, as in the Scotch name Boag, which is identical, at least in sound, with that of the insect called by the English bug. The desperate efforts made here by the hereditary victims are truly alarming. Some write the word Bogie; but finding that they have thus got into the spiritual world, they rush madly into Bogue, and sometimes Boog. When a name, on the other hand, has a meaning complimentary to its possessor, the grand desideratum is, to make it as plain as possible. Thus Archibald is somewhat equivocal as it stands; and it is neatly and decisively modernised into Archbold. Frequently the only fault complained of is the want of euphony-as in Mucklewham. Somebody says, in the Waverley novels, that he could not think Venus beautiful if announced in a drawing-room as Miss Mac-Jupiter. What would he think, then, if presented for a quadrille to Miss Mucklewham? But thanks to the taste of the times, the name is nearly obsolete, and our fair partner is now Miss Meikleham. A familiar object, even when its associations are good, is not approved of for a name. Burn (a stream) was sought to be made a little grander, by being given in the plural, Burns; but personal associations, as we have already observed, having no effect in this species of mania, some diverged into Burnes; while others, determining to sever definitively all connection with poetical immortality, called themselves Burness. Mill, in like manner, was made Mills, and was then sunk entirely in Milne; and Home became Hume, and Hume, Hulme. John, on the same principle, is pluralised Johns, and this made into Johnes, and Jones. But personal associations are only ineffective when modern. It is considered a great attainment to get back Cumming to its probable origin, Comyng; and those who are not satisfied with elongating Graham into Grahame, rest with delighted pride upon the Celtic Graeme. The colours, we need hardly add, are always sought to be washed out. White becomes Whyte, and is then entirely obliterated in Wight; and Brown, after passing through the intermediate Browne, relinquishes its identity in Broun. Column for Young People. THE OAK AND THE SOW. On the skirts of an extensive forest there grew, in days gone by, a huge, magnificent, wide-spreading oak, whose ponderous branches, gnarled, angular, and knotty, and each the size of a respectable tree, stretched over a space of ground so large, that I am afraid to say how much, lest In all these transformations the aim is the same-I should be suspected of exaggeration. From these vast distinction. We wish to divorce ourselves from things branches he shot up a thousand arms, ten thousand hands, common and vulgar, and fancy-oddly enough-that and hundreds of thousands of tiny fingers, into the change we in some measure accomplish this by misspelling the ful sky, and waved his crumpled and scolloped leaves in the balmy spring-time air, or spread them 'neath the hot name we have received from our parents. We once knew an instance, and rather an instructive one, in and luxurious herds who came to revel and ruminate in summer sun-a myriad of quivering parasols for the lazy which this nominal distinction was carried progressively his quiet shadow. As you stood beside his monstrous on with the advance of the fortunes of the individual. trunk in the hot swelter of July, and looked upwards, you His original name was Cuningham; and he was born might search long in vain for a single glimpse of the blue in a station in which people think very little, and fre- overhead: yet all was gay and beautiful, far more beautiful quently know very little, about their patronymics. He than I can tell you, and rich with a thousand tints of green, was an errand-lad and porter in a draper's shop in one and red, and gold, and fluttering light: and there, in an of the larger towns on the west coast of Scotland, and endless suite of bowery halls, the squirrel kept joyful holibeing a smart fellow, was on some occasion promoted day; and tribes of feathered vagrants chirped, and sung, to a station behind the counter. This was a great ad- and made merry; and wood-doves cooed and crowed at vancement for the errand-lad, and he became all on a livelong day together; and the little gray tomtits darted eventide; and the woodpecker tapped and tapped half the sudden prodigiously genteel. What first put it into his up and down like mad, and said their say with the best of head, it is hard to say; but certain it is, that a little them; and the chaffinch played his one bar of music fifty twirl at the end of his written name subsided gradually times over, and then flew down saucily to see how the into an e, and at last, to all intents and purposes, he world was going on outside, but soon came back again was Mr Cuninghame. In two years after this con- with a worm or a grub for his private eating. It was the summation, he was left very unexpectedly the sum of very place for the birds, was that famous oak; and large L.200 by a distant relation; and Mr Cuninghame de- enough, I am sure, for a new Parliament House for all the termined to retire from his employer's counter, and tribes that ever flew, supposing them to be satisfied with take one of his own. While looking out for a proper a reasonable number of representatives. place for his intended establishment, a new change winter, when all his garniture of leaves was gone, and he A very different affair, I reckon, was the great oak in occurred in his name, corresponding with the expansion stood naked to the stormy winds; but he didn't care, no, of his ideas in other respects; and he became now, to not an acorn, for them: he was sound in trunk, and whole the great surprise of his acquaintance, Mr Coyning- in every limb; and though he had often squared his arms hame. But it so happened that, before he had quite so boldly against the thunder-clouds, the forky lightning fixed upon a site for his warehouse,' he was quite fixed had never touched him yet, and he wasn't a bit afraid, not himself in admiration of a young lady, the heiress of a he. Then, when the snow storms came, he grasped the tallow-chandler; and as she was much struck with his flying flakes with every finger, and dressed himself in a person, and the uncommon gentility of his name, he new white robe, and was prouder, if possible, of such a abandoned his present pursuit, and laid siege to her dainty surplice, than of his mantle of Lincoln green. Both as the more promising speculation of the two. in winter and summer he was a noble and magnificent course of his courtship a new change occurred in his spectacle; and everybody that passed by, or sat and rested name, and he was now Mr Coynynghame. It is sup- their heads again and again as they went away to look at on his gnarled and twisted roots, said as much, and turned posed that this was in homage to the taste of the him in new points of view. And many came from great heiress; and the supposition receives some colour from distances to see him, for his renown had spread through the fact, that after she proved faithless, he knocked out all the country round about; and artists had painted his indignantly the additional y. It was not so easy, how- picture, ay, many a time; and poets had written sonnets ever, to place himself in other respects in statu quo. His in his praise. And pic-nic parties would come on sunny capital was by this time nearly all gone; and after a days, and spread their table-cloth under his broad shadow; dreadful struggle with his pride, he was compelled to and then the voice of mirth, and laughter, and song rang step behind a counter once more as the shopman of through his green chambers all the festive hours till sunanother. With a stern philosophy, he signalised his down. Then, sometimes on the short dry sward beneath fall by the sacrifice of the remaining y: but the Furies reeled in the riotous dance, to the music of their own his boughs, troops of village lads and lasses tripped and were not yet appeased. The great monetary crisis took merry voices, and floundered about, if the truth must be place at this time, which reduced most of the establish- told, in a manner that would have driven a dancing-master ments in the town, and among a multitude of others, to destruction. And often in the quiet evening, when the threw Mr Cuninghame out of work. His remaining fiery-red sun seemed cutting a notch in the gray distant funds were quickly exhausted. What was to be done? hill behind which he was fast sinking to rest, a pair of He had the good sense to take a porter's employment whispering lovers would come and sit beneath his darkenagain, and became once more plain John Cuningham. ing roof, and gaze up into the peaceful sky, till the pale In this history we see movement without progress. stars came out to their night-watch, and twinkled through The mistake was to suppose that a change of position the trembling foliage, among which the night-wind sighed rendered a change in the name an advantage, or that fine great oak had stood there in his beauty and glory. a dreamy tune. Nobody could tell how many years this any additional dignity could be derived from spelling it The oldest man in the village two miles off could see with one letter instead of another. It was very proper little or no difference in him, though he had known him for for the porter to abandon his jacket in favour of a coat more than threescore years; and declared, moreover, that when he became the shopman; but a name is no indi- his father, ay, and grandfather too, had never, in his recolcation of rank, any more than rank is an indication of lection, mentioned the tree by any other name than that of In the |