course. He thrusts a paper into your face, stands pensively mute, looks wise and prepossessing, and mighty honest. You read his tale of wo, certified by sundry well-known civil magistrates and learned professors-give him a dollar, and receive his silent but expressive benediction-and next day read in the gazette that the said forlorn, wandering, pennyless Turk is a downright, full-blooded, native Vermonter! He passes on however, from village to village, and enacts the same part everywhere with equal success. He is proclaimed as an impostor in every newspaper. Still, from Bennington to St. Louis, he contrives to cheat every man he meets with. He was here in Nashville about eighteen months ago, and honoured my lonely cottage with a call; and though I had read all about his Turkship a year before, yet I could not prevail on my lady purse-keeper to withhold the customary dollar. He seemed so ingenuous, so friendly, so like a Turk, so un-American, there was no resisting his appeal direct to the purse. His lingo too,.when he did speak, was pure classical Arabic, as anybody could perceive-consequently he was well educated. He was perfectly genteel, and utterly above the servile artifices of vulgar beggars; ergo, he was a son of the Grand Sultan, or a pasha (pacha) with three tails at least. And he might condescend to carry off a dozen or score of our lovely damsels to enliven his princely harem in the proud City of Constantine-and who could withstand such eloquent pretensions?

True, this pretty exquisite was but a home-bred

VOL. III.-39

Yankee after all. Still, Yankee-like, he understood the foible of his countrymen, and knew precisely in what garb to address himself to their sympathies and to their vanity. He therefore went forth to seek adventures as a foreigner of rank. And he is probably going the rounds at this day.-If not as a Turkish heir apparent, yet as a Chinese Mandarin, or Hindu Pundit, or Egyptian Sheik, or Grecian Hospodar, or Wallachian Vaivode, or Polish General just escaped from the tender mercies of a Russian Court-martial.

Italian and Sicilian beggars have been traversing our country for some thirty years past. I have encountered the same individuals repeatedly. They are always provided with the most satisfactory and well-authenticated testimonials—of which, by-the-way, there is said to be a regular manufactory in Philadelphia, where all sorts of signatures and seals may be procured for a trifle. Their usual pretext is, that a village or convent has been destroyed by fire, an avalanche, a volcano, or an earthquake, and that they are deputed to solicit charity for the wretched survivors.

I was once waited on by a Russian (so he professed himself) whose papers were duly endorsed by the Mayor of New York-setting forth that a vessel, containing a number of his relatives and friends, had been captured in the Mediterranean and carried into Algiers, where they were sold as slaves, and urging every kind-hearted American to contribute his mite towards their redemption. He got a dollar from each of us-about a dozen at dinner at the time, and just after the first six bottles

When a cup of coffee

of champagne had evanished. had somewhat regulated our charitable outgoings, we were not a little chagrined and vexed at the trick; but we took no particular pains to interrupt his gainful operations, and we had the satisfaction to find that all our neighbours, drunk or sober, had been equally stupid and generous.

Within the last three years, I have had two hundred and fifty-nine similar calls from shipwrecked Germans, Spaniards and Portuguese; from exiled patriots of every country, and from other unfortunates of all sorts, who protested by signs or by some kind of Lingua Franca that they could not speak English, and who had English papers and credentials to speak and lie for them.

About two weeks ago, a stout, hale, thickset, whiskered, brazen-faced, red-nosed scape-gallows came to my house, bolted in, made his bow and tried to be graceful and to sport the gentleman-handed me his book-like a lady's album in externals-which at first I refused to look at, as I knew his object instinctively and by the aid of phrenology-thanks to my sagacity and to this superlatively invaluable and never-to-be-sufficiently lauded queen of sciences. When I bid him "begone" in blunt English, and with a scowl and a stamp of the foot which would have annihilated anything human, he smiled like a cockney and affected not to understand me. He then mumbled a little French, and intimated that he could parler Francois un peu, mais not un vor ov tam Anglois. As I could not get rid of the Hercules by words, looks, or gestures, and feeling no special penchant to attempt it

vi et armis, I cast my eye at length and in despair over the pages of his manuscript book. He was described as an Italian patriot soldier, who had suffered all but martyrdom in the holy cause of liberty-had lost his last sous-and had finally been whisked across the ocean or through the air, (Dr. Faust or Mother Carey can tell how,) and set down, safe and sound, in the good City of Savannah; where his misfortunes and hair-breadth escapes by flood and field had excited the deepest sympathy. And so the names of lady and gentleman donors continued to fill his pages and his pockets all the way from Augusta, (whither he had a free passage and the best birth in a steamer,) through Georgia, the Creek Nation, and Tennessee, even unto Metropolitan Nashville. As I had not dined, I succeeded for once in keeping my cash.

Since the above, two wounded, maimed, crippled, wobegone, limping, groaning, pitiful, drunken old soldiers, who fought, as their story told, at New Orleans, on one side or t'other, and were all but killed in battle, and had been dying ever since, and who certainly would die before next morning unless my right worshipful honour would be pleased to bestow the needful to wet their whistles and mend their coats.

Alas! what is to be

done? What was our grand penitentiary built for? What are our lawyers and courts and legislature about?

THE SEASON.*

[DECEMBER 16, 1831.]

THE present will, probably, long be remembered as the cold winter, or, at any rate, as the cold December. Our oldest people tell us that the Cumberland River has never been completely frozen at this place but twice before:-viz., in 1786 and 1796. It is not to be inferred however from this fact, that the weather has not been sufficiently cold during any other winter to freeze ordinary rivers. The truth is, it requires more intensely severe and longer continued frost to congeal the waters of the Cumberland than to produce the same effect upon the Hudson or the Delaware. This is owing to the very high and almost perpendicular banks, and to the rapid current of our noble river. And to these two permanent causes, may be added the generally high state of the water at this season. At present, the river is not swollen beyond its ordinary summer level: and it is now completely bridged over with solid ice, so that the heaviest loaded wagons cross it in safety.

Since about the first instant, the mercury in Farenheit's thermometer has ranged, at sunrise, between several degrees below zero and ten above, and with * Printed in the National Banner, over the signature of G. F. G.