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We were received on the Irish coast as if the natives had learned the Zetland notion of ill-luck attending those who save the drowning. My brother lost his life,-or rather it was taken from him by the delay of those who might have saved it. A poor serjeant of marines crawled into the hut of a purple-faced Irish dweller on the coast, and asked his help to seek for his wife among the wrecked. "Ye'z find her here, and comfort beside," answered Looney; and shewed his guest the lifeless remains of a drowned woman, whose apron, folded close round her neck, contained a leathern purse full of dollars, and a living boy. The purse belonged to the widowed husband, the boy to my lost brother, and both afforded consolation to the survivors.

My younger brother, Glumfret, succeeded to the guardianship of the little baronet, and to a suitable mansion, which I shall entitle Bow-wow Hall. He was a bachelor; frank, bountiful, and benevolent, like a genuine Milesian, and very solicitous to console his orphan nephew, to whom, as I bave said in a former section, he bequeathed an ample legacy in a codicil which cost some trouble to find, and more to prove it. The young baronet chose to settle in the country, and I paid a visit in the neighbourhood to offer him my advice as his eldest and nearest relative. Sir Tristram Craginmoss, for our ancient familyappellation, "Quackenboss," required thus refining, made his entrée into a mansion situated, as poets would say, like a thing built in a dream amongst whatever is beautiful in nature;-that is, on the edge of a hill sloping on one side to a fine trout-stream, on the other broken into a rude staircase, carpeted and festooned with wild shrubs-and this hill itself sheltered by a more giant family of highlands, all purple with heather or grey in the distance. The house had a cellar stored with claret fit for a viceroy, servants never known to miss a battle or a bottle for their master's honour, and lodging-rooms enough to entertain the county-with the study of astrology, for every part of the roof was an inlet to starlight.-His tenants lived in mud-hovels ingeniously built in ditches to save one side-wall, and roofed with the branches of his trees, covered with a thin paring from his Eur. Mag. Vol. 81. Feb. 1822.

meadow-ground, and again with rushes or the stalks of beans and potatoes. Here, in the form of a divan, crouched low upon the earth under a canopy of smoke, he found his leaseholders, and sometimes their calves and pigs, in a state so squalid yet so gleeful, so idle yet so content, that Sir Tristram doubted how he should be able to interrupt such merry misery. However, he made an essay. Forty houses were built of stone found in the picturesque chasm behind Bowwow Hall, and roofed with the short, thick, matted heath which covers the moving bog whence our original name of Quackenboss is derived. These tenements he promised rent-free for a year to the first forty unmarried men who laboured forty weeks in draining the aforesaid bog without being more than twice intoxicated, or once in a fray. And he gave an acre of good potatoe ground on a long lease and an easy rent to the first dozen of these forty who chose wives, provided they drew their damsels every Sunday during the term of courtship in a broadwheeled waggon from their church or chapel to his hall-door, where he gave with his own hand a deep cup of ale to be shared between the lovers. Thus, as he merrily told the future brides, he accustomed them to hold the reins, and go long and rough journies patiently together; at the same time smoothing his own road from the good old hall to the church. These were his public amusements: but in private, like the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, or the modern hero of Shenstone-Green, he spent many joyous days in traversing his neighbourhood clothed like an ordinary post-boy or a begging musician, taking his share of the mirth at wakes and weddings, sure to leave a silver offering on the dead man's breast or in the bride's glass, but especially wherever he saw a clean hearth and a mended platter. And when, which sometimes happened, he found an idle husband and a tattered wife, he gave a birch-broom to one and a whistle to the other.

All this made Sir Tristram the delight of Quackenboss-town, and the happiest man in it. Therefore be required my consolation, which, when I can, I always address to the prosperous. Almost every book and every body teaches us how to console sorrow, but it needs some skill R

to make happy people accept comfort.

"Aunt Tormenton," said Sir Tristram, leaping into the middle of my conservatory one day, "I have a pfoposal to make to your ladyship. My ceilings have been new-plaistered, and I have taught my groom of the chambers to sweep the stairs with a handbrush instead of the odd flap of his coat. I shall order my butler to see my table well spread for half a dozen every day, and a dozen of good claret ready under the sideboard. And Looney shall carry circular letters to all my gentlemen-neighbours, notifying that they will find my table and my claret ready daily at my hour. All I ask of you is to sit at the head of it, and not to leave us."

"I am glad you are going to keep a menagerie at home, instead of showing yourself abroad. People say, you visit your tenants incog. only to drink the ale you send them: but you may comfort yourself, for that is not so bad as some of your particular friends' hints, that when you sent the bellringers a guinea on your birth-day, you went in disguise, and rung yourself, to have a share of it.-But which must I govern, Sir Tristram, - the 'table or the claret?"

"Both, my good aunt, and then 'neither will be abused. There is no brute without instinct, and in a venerable lady's presence, decency is instinctive. Lady Di. Sterlingwit married a toper, and a foxhunter by profession, yet she mellowed him into sense and his companions into manners by keeping a cheerful table always spread, and herself always in her place at it. Now Lady Diana was a fine woman of forty, with wit enough to laugh at a right jest, and grace enough to rebuke a wrong one. So she kept her husband sober by making his guests drink less, and his guests drank less because they were ashamed to be worse than cattle in her presence. -But she neither found fault with their 'dusty hunting-jackets,nor their hounds asleep on her hearth-rug and you, who are a still finer woman of fifty, will find no fault with the toasts you give yourself, or the bumpers we drink to your health."

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"Certainly not, my dear Sir Tristram, if you promise they shall be the last. But pray be comforted when you find all the good wives in the county

your enemies. In the first place, you will prevent half a dozen honest geutlemen from breaking their necks; and in the next, you will make two or three dozen discontented if they cannot bring their shot-bags and their hounds into the best parlour without hearing murmurs. There will be neîther order nor peace, neither clean carpets nor unbroken chairs, in any house within twenty miles, unless every gentlemen has a Lady Di. and a set of oak-settles. There will be a commission of lunacy proposed for you;-but, by way of comfort, it is thought of already."

"Thought of, Lady Tormenton !I have had the thanks of ten husbands for abolishing dinners on plate after fifteen days' notice and a week spent in unpapering china and dusting`damask curtains-"

"Which is half the purpose of their ladies' lives, and perhaps all their consolation!-Well, Sir Tristram, never mind their ungrateful treachery. It is some comfort that your neighbours have only drank three hogsheads of your best wine while they were slandering you; and I hardly know whether it is slander to say a miser's money ought to be a spendthrift's inheritance.'

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"A miser's, madam! my uncle wore a patchwork gown when it suited a fit of the gout better than nankeen; but he fed two bankrupt-brothers, cleared their estates of debts, and paid annuitants who would never had had a suit of clothes without his help,-though they gave him one which lasted all his life, a suit in chancery. But he is the strongest man who can bear the most injuries."

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Very true, Sir Tristram; it is for that you must console yourself. People say you empty your cellars so fast because you know your uncle hid all his bank-notes in a bottle, and you have uncorked a thousand at least without finding them. Some say, your uncle stayed in the East Indies till he turned Hindoo, and believed a man who meddled with waterpan would be a stone two or three hundred years. Therefore you take great care of the old stones of this house, and never touch water."

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hope my uncle will not be born again a country-gentleman with a consoling friend."

And he went forth to look at his cottages, and returned in no placid humour, having seen his foster-brother Looney, whom he had found diving among the ducks in a slush-pool and lodged in a comfortable tenement, now amusing himself with making another pool in the middle of the floor, because, as he said, "he could not be aisy without the ould place." I consoled Sir Tristram, by shewing him the pastime in a large barn which he had fitted up as a sort of public kitehen for all who laboured on his land and had no hearths of their own. Therein was a dame, black and fireburnt as a Croatian Gospodina, cowered in a bed of soft mud, and employed in plucking an old hen whose roost had been over the chimney above the bread-fleak, where might be seen some as hard and dirty as an Illyrian Bridecake made to throw over the house without breaking. Two or three and twenty comely lasses and their swains were dancing to the sound of a jew's harp without shoes, but with caps which seemed to have served as slippers; while the blankets given by Sir Tristram for winter-comforts were hung on the men's shoulders, and their arms thrust through holes in them, according to Sir John Falstaff's notion of a herald's coat without sleeves. Then I comforted my nephew for the incurable taste of his vassals, by reminding him that his Irish Ghronipata was no worse than a virtuous Indian housewife who sprinkles her floor with manure, and cleans her rice-boiler with straw, ashes, and water. The next week he celebrated his birth-day by giving a copper-boiler to the damsel who brought the fattest fowl, and a new coat to him who wrestled best, hoping to teach the wives the means of good cookery, and their husbands a more creditable way of shewing their strength than in brawls. But the winner, not liking the incumbrance of sleeves, skewered the flaps of his new coat round his neck, while a rogue composedly walked away with the copper prize on his head; and when the lady asked if he had seen her's, replied, “You should have put it on safe as I've done."-I comforted my nephew for the failure of his bounty to the poor knaves, by shewing him that

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the rich were as ill-pleased with it as they. He had the consolation of knowing, that one of the brightest belles among the spectators had said, ""Twas pity Sir Tristram had pot made his exhibition exactly like the old Coteswold games, by dressing the fool of the company in a motley coat."

And as a consoling proof that this lady was not particular in her opinion, I shewed him the pattern of a party-coloured silk which all the ladies of Quackenboss intended to wear by the name of the Tristram Motley. But Sir Tristram had one of those solid heads which resist all the delicate points of neighbourly kindness, and he chose his own way of consoling himself. He borrowed one of my band-boxes, and folding up his uncle's celebrated patchwork garment in a ream of silver paper, sent it to every kind friend who had feasted at his house and slandered it's present and former owner, with permission to take the pattern, as it had been so much admired. He also sent a Memoir of his own life, to spare, he said, the trouble of enquiries.-For his unlucky attempts to mend his tenants, he took no farther comfort than bribing the apothecary of Quackenboss to cure his rheumatic patients by a vapour bath in the American mode. For which purpose he fitted up a kind of cellar with bricks, and half a dozen of the most refractory tenants were so nearly smothered and reduced to jelly among the fumes of plantainleaves and hot vinegar, that they never fought a battle or consulted an apothecary again.-To complete his comfort, I said,-" My dear nephew, when country-people laugh at the plagues of London, it is like a sieve blaming a needle for having a hole in it. You had better resemble Whitfield, who could not find an hour to suit his town friends, because they were shopping, or dressing, or in the Park, or dining with two dozen, or going to a rout; than be among people who have nothing to do but to call on you in the morning, dine, drink, fish, shoot, or play billiards with you, except to question your servants, borrow your money, criticise your conduct, and laugh at the whole of it. Your London friends are pleasant puppets if you touch the right wires, but country-people cover you with dust, like Egyptian mummies, if you come too near them."

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DOMESTIC TALES.GRATITUDE.

CAROLINE'S TALE.

THERE is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than Gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction, that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance. It is not, like the practice of many other virtues, difficult and painful, but attended with so much pleasure, that were there no positive command which enjoined it, nor any recompence laid up for it hereafter, a generous mind would indulge in it for the uatural gratification that it affords.

"Addison, that's a dear good child," cried Mrs. Jerningham, as she imprinted an affectionate kiss on the cheek of her little niece, yet glowing with the modesty of merit seeking concealment, " you shall be no loser by your charity, my love," continued she, in allusion to a scene that she had accidentally witnessed, where, Emma having listened with tearful interest to the recital of a bare-footed beggar girl, who presented her petition for alms at the hospitable gate of Atherfield, without consulting any one but the dictates of a benevolent heart, and, as she imagined, without being an object of observation, had hastened to relieve the wants and miseries which the sympathies of her tender nature taught her keenly to appreciate, though her elevated sphere in society removed her far from the apprehension, that she should ever experience them.

The ample domain of Atherfield, situate within a few miles of the commercial city of Norwich, of which Mr. Jerningham was the present occupant, had not descended to him in right of inheritance. The heir at law having been lost in his passage homeward from the West Indies, the estate had reverted, by virtue of the testament of it's late possessor, to Augustus Jerningham, his very distant relation, who, together with his wife, his son, an orphan niece, whom he had taken under his protection, and a numerous train of happy and well regulated domestics and dependents, resided constantly on the manor; and proved, by his beneficence to the indigent, and the sentiments of esteem with which he was regarded by an extensive cir

cle of friends, that the property could not have fallen into more deserving hands.

Mrs. Jerningham, with a view to mark her approbation of the spirit of generosity and charity that Emma had manifested, resolved to present her with some memorial of the circumstance; and the little girl, now nearly eleven years old, having named some object of youthful ambition, it was agreed upon, that Miss Corbett, her governess, should accompany her to Norwich that same evening, to make the desired purchase.

The juvenile repository was accordingly visited; the toy was bought, and Emina and her instructress were on their way homeward, when, in proceeding along the public road, just as they reached the turning that led up to Atherfield, they came up with a groupe of children, part of whom were employed in searching for something on the ground, while the rest were gathered round an interesting looking lad, apparently about fourteen years of age, who seemed to be an object of compassion and pity to the youthful throng. "What is the matter here?" inquired Miss Corbett, as they drew near; "Have you lost any thing?"

"Yes, ma'am," answered one of the urchins who stood nigh, "he's lost almost as much as five pounds, he says."

This repetition of his grievance seemed to excite the poor little fellow's sorrow afresh, and he sobbed aloud."

"How did you lose it, my lad?" asked Miss Corbett, addressing the afflicted culprit, who being still incapable of replying, her first informant satisfied her inquiry, saying, “He does not know how he lost it."

"I dare say he has been careless perhaps in playing as he came along.'

But this ill natured remark did not provoke any attempt at exculpation.

"I wonder who he is?" prompted Emma, naturally; Miss Corbett adopted the suggestion, and asked his name.

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Godfrey Howard," with difficulty articulated he, to whom the query was directed.

"And where do you come from?" continued the governess.

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Yes, six; but I must never see them again; that was all the money we had in the world."

"And how came you to be entrusted with that money!"

"Because I was going to Norwich to buy some silk for father."

Are you the eldest of your family?”

Yes; I've got one little sister only three weeks old."

"Ah! dear madam, what can we do?" exclaimed the kind hearted Emma, who never heard of distress without feeling desirous to alleviate it. "We can do nothing at all, my dear," coldly replied the prudential governante, and was preparing to move onward.

"How I do wish I had got as much money," said little Emma, gently detaining her preceptress, “I am sure that poor boy should have it all."

"Very good, my love; but as you have not got so much money, there is no use in our staying here."

** I wish my mama Jerningham was here," said Emma, dejectedly, "I dare say she has got five pounds; I will go and tell her all about it, and the poor boy shall come too."

"Nonsense, Miss Emma; the lad is quite a stranger to us; we do not even know that his story is true.”

"Oh governess, bow unkind that is of you to say so; I am quite sure nobody could cry so for nothing," said the sweet innocent.

"It was very heedless of him to lose it."

"But only think if you had lost it yourself, ma'am; and you had got six little brothers and sisters, and your mother was so ill, and your father so cross. Only do look at him, governess."

And even Miss Corbett's heart was moved with pity, as she contemplated

the miserable object before her, standing silent and motionless; his arms hanging listlessly by his side; his eyes rivetted on the ground in vacant thoughtlessness; the big tears coursing each other down his wan cheek; his tattered garb bespoke extreme poverty, his features were clouded with an expression of the deepest sadness, and his whole appearance was that of the most abject want and woe.

"Do pray, dear Miss Corbett, do ask him to go with us to Atherfield." "Bless my soul, Miss Emma, what do you suppose your uncle would say to us?"

"Indeed, I do not think that my uncle would be angry; and if he was, I would tell him that it was all my fault."

"But, perhaps, you might only delude the poor child with false hopes; you are not sure that your uncle and aunt would relieve him."

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Yes, I know my good mama would give him something; and I would tell my dear Augustus, and he should persuade papa. Now do, dearest madam, ask him to come with us. I will take all the blame on myself."

"Come on, Miss Emma," "interrupted Miss Corbett, impatiently, "there is quite a crowd collecting; and she endeavoured forcibly to draw her charge onward.

"Then if you won't speak to him, I will," exclaimed Emma, with spirit; and, breaking from her governess, she made her way up to the afflicted youth; when, overcome with timidity at the idea of addressing a stranger, and in the presence of so many hearers too, she shrank back, and looked round in terror for Miss Corbett; who, seeing her determined on the execution of her beneficent design, now thought fit to second it; and, after asking the poor lad a great number of questions, she, at length, though still adverse to her inclination, bade him follow her to Atherfield.

As the trio arrived at the end of the avenue that led up to the house, Emma perceiving her cousin at a little distance, ran forward to join him; and, after detailing the story of the lost money, had just exclaimed, with much earnestness, "I wish I had not bought my doll," when Mrs. Jerningham, coming softly behind them, said, "And why so, Emma?"

The two children immediately com

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