stored. Consider, sir, the value of such a piece of timber here."

The most venerable sticks now surviving are the smooth amber-coloured canes in the possession of old ladies. They have sometimes a gold head, but oftener a crook of ivory. But they have latterly been much displaced by light umbrellas, the handles of which are imitations of them; and these are gradually retreating before the young parasol, especially about town. The old ladies take the wings of the stage-coaches, and are run away with by John Pullen in a style of infinite convenience. The other sticks in use are for the most part of cherry, oak, and crab, and seldom adorned with more than a leathern tassel-often with nothing. Bamboo and other canes do not abound as might be expected from our intercourse with India; but commerce, in this as in other respects, has overshot its mark. People cannot afford to use sticks, any more than bees could in their hives. Of the common sabbatical cane we have already spoken. There is a very sufficing little manual, equally light and lissom, yclept an ebony switch; but we have not seen it often.

That sticks, however, are not to be despised by the leisurely, any one who has known what it is to want words, or to slice off the head of a thistle, will allow. The utility of the stick seems divisible into three heads. First, to give a general consciousness of power; second, which may be called a part of the first, to help the demeanour; and third, which may be called a part of the second, to assist a man over the gaps of speech,-the little awkward intervals, called want of ideas.

Deprive a man of his stick, who is accustomed to carry one, and with what a diminished sense of vigour and gracefulness he issues out of his house! Wanting his stick, he wants himself. His self-possession, like Acres's on the duel-ground, has gone out of his fingers' ends. But restore it him, and how he resumes his energy! If a common walking-stick, he cherishes the top of it with his fingers, putting them out and back again

with a fresh desire to feel it in his palm! How he strikes it against the ground, and feels power come back to his arm! How he makes the pavement ring with the ferrule, if in a street; or decapitates the downy thistles aforesaid, if in a field! Then, if it be a switch, how firmly he jerks his step at the first infliction of it on the air! How he quivers the point of it as he goes, holding the handle with a straight-dropped arm and a tight grasp! How his foot keeps time to the switches! How the passengers think he is going to ride, whether he is or not! How he twigs the luckless pieces of lilac or other shrubs, that peep out of a garden railing! And if a sneaking-looking dog is coming by, how he longs to exercise his despotism and his moral sense at once, by giving him an invigorating twinge!

But what would certain men of address do without their cane or switch? There is an undoubted rhabdosophy, sceptrosophy, or wisdom of the stick, besides the famous divining-rod with which people used to discover treasures and fountains. It supplies a man with inaudible remarks, and an inexpressible number of graces. Sometimes, breathing between his teeth, he will twirl the end of it upon his stretched-out toe; and this means, that he has an infinite number of easy and powerful things to say, if he had a mind. Sometimes he holds it upright between his knees, and tattoos it against his teeth or under lip; which implies that he meditates coolly. On other occasions, he switches the side of his boot with it, which announces jauntiness in general. Lastly, if he has not a bon-mot ready in answer to one, he has only to thrust his stick at your ribs, and say, "Ah! you rogue !"—which sets him above you in an instant, as a sort of patronising wit, who can dispense with the necessity of joking.

At the same time, to give it its due zest in life, a stick has its inconveniences. If you have yellow gloves on, and drop it in the mud, a too hasty recovery is awkward. To have it stick between the stones of a pavement is not pleasant; especially if it snap the ferrule off; or more especially if an old gentleman or lady is coming behind you, and, after making them start back

with winking eyes, it threatens to trip them up. To lose the ferrule on a country road, renders the end liable to the growth of a sordid brush; which, not having a knife with you, or a shop in which to borrow one, goes pounding the wet up against your legs. In a crowded street, you may have the stick driven into a large pane of glass; upon which an unthinking tradesman, utterly indifferent to a chain of events, issues forth, and demands twelve shillings and sixpence. But perhaps we have been anticipated on these points by that useful regulator of the philosophy of every-day matters, who wrote a treatise entitled "The Miseries of Human Life." We shall only add, that the stick is never more in the way than when you meet two ladies, your friends, whose arms you are equally bound and beatified to take. It cannot possibly be held in the usual way, to say nothing of its going against the gown or pelisse; and to carry it over the shoulder, endangers veils and bonnets, besides rendering you liable to the gallant reproaches of the unreflecting; who, thinking you must have walked with the ladies from all eternity, instead of the next street, ask you whether you could not leave your stick at home even for two. But see how situations the most perplexing to an unreflecting good-will may change their character before a spirit truly enlightened by the smiles on each side of him! Now is the time, if the fortunate sceptrosopher wishes to be thought well of in a fair bosom. He throws away the stick. The lady smiles and deprecates, and thinks how generously he could protect her without a stick.

It was thus that Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was an aspirant at Elizabeth's court at Greenwich, attending her one day on a walk, in company with other fine spirits of that age, and coming upon a plashy strip of ground which put her Majesty's princely foot to a non-plus, no sooner saw her dilemma than he took off a gallant velvet cloak which he had about him, and, throwing it across the mud and dirt, made such a passage for her to go over, as her royal womanhood never forgot.

N

A NOW.

DESCRIPTIVE OF A HOT DAY.

OW the rosy-(and lazy-) fingered Aurora, issuing from her saffron house, calls up the moist vapours to surround her, and goes veiled with them as long as she can ; till Phoebus, coming forth in his power, looks everything out of the sky, and holds sharp uninterrupted empire from his throne of beams. Now the mower begins to make his sweeping cuts more slowly, and resorts oftener to the beer. Now the carter sleeps a-top of his load of hay, or plods with double slouch of shoulder, looking out with eyes winking under his shading hat, and with a hitch upward of one side of his mouth. Now the little girl at her grandmother's cottage-door watches the coaches that go by, with her hand held up over her sunny forehead. Now labourers look well, resting in their white shirts at the doors of rural alehouses. Now an elm is fine there, with a seat under it; and horses drink out of the trough, stretching their yearning necks with loosened collars; and the traveller calls for his glass of ale, having been without one for more than ten minutes; and his horse stands wincing at the flies, giving sharp shivers of his skin, and moving to and fro his ineffectual docked tail; and now Miss Betty Wilson, the host's daughter, comes streaming forth in a flowered gown and ear-rings, carrying with four of her beautiful fingers the foaming glass, for which, after the traveller has drank it, she receives with an indifferent eye,

looking another way, the lawful twopence; that is to say, unless the traveller, nodding his ruddy face, pays some gallant compliment to her before he drinks, such as, “I'd rather kiss you, my dear, than the tumbler," or, "I'll wait for you, my love, if you marry me;" upon which, if the man is good-looking, and the lady in good-humour, she smiles and bites her lips, and says, "Ah, men can talk fast enough;" upon which the old stagecoachman, who is buckling something near her, before he sets off, says in a hoarse voice, “So can women too, for that matter," and John Boots grins through his ragged red locks, and doats on the repartee all the day after. Now grasshopers "fry," as Dryden says. Now cattle stand in water, and ducks are envied. Now boots and shoes, and trees by the road-side, are thick with dust; and dogs, rolling in it, after issuing out of the water, into which they have been thrown to fetch sticks, come scattering horror among the legs of the spectators. Now a fellow who finds he has three miles farther to go in a pair of tight shoes is in a pretty situation. Now rooms with the sun upon them become intolerable; and the apothecary's apprentice, with a bitterness beyond aloes, thinks of the pond he used to bathe in at school. Now men with powdered heads (especially if thick) envy those that are unpowdered, and stop to wipe them up hill, with countenances that seem to expostulate with destiny. Now boys assemble round the village pump with a ladle to it, and delight to make a forbidden splash, and get wet through the shoes. Now also they make suckers of leather, and bathe all day long in rivers and ponds, and follow the fish into their cool corners, and say millions of " My eyes!" at tittle-bats." Now the bee, as he hums along, seems to be talking heavily of the heat. Now doors and brick-walls are burning to the hand; and a walled lane, with dust and broken bottles in it, near a brick-field, is a thing not to be thought of. Now a green lane, on the contrary, thick set with hedgerow elms, and having the noise of a brook "rumbling in pebble-stone," is one of the pleasantest things in the world. Now youths and damsels walk