name was a foot and a half long, had promised him an appendix; which appendix treated of the Red Sea and Solomon's signet-ring; with forms of mittimus for ghosts that might be refractory; and probably a riot act, for any émeute amongst ghosts inclined to raise barricades; since he often thrilled our young hearts by supposing the case (not at all unlikely, he affirmed) that a federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place amongst the infinite generations of ghosts against the single generation of men at any one time composing the garrison of earth.

*

For some time he turned his thoughts on philosophy, and read lectures to us every night upon some branch or other of physics. This undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies for their power of walking on the ceiling. "Pooh!" he said, "they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be done. Ah! you should see me standing upright on the ceiling, with my head downwards, for halfan-hour together, meditating profoundly." My sister Mary remarked, that we should all be very glad to see him in that position. "If that's

the case," he replied, "it's very well that all is ready, except as to a strap or two." Being an excellent skater, he had first imagined that, if held up until he had started, he might then, by taking a bold sweep ahead, keep himself in position through the continued impetus of skating. But this he

found not to answer; because, as he observed, "the friction was too retarding from the plaster of Paris; but the case would be very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was not, he changed his plan. The true secret, he now discovered, was this he would consider himself in the light of a humming-top; he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of

4

course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis—perhaps he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the flies," that never improved in their art, nor made anything of it. The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said, "if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so for five months?" "" Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work; a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a humming-top that was required, but a peg-top. Now, this, in order to keep up the vertigo at full stretch, without which, to a certainty, gravitation would prove too much for him, needed

S

to be whipped incessantly. But that was precisely what a gentleman ought not to tolerate; to be scourged unintermittingly on the legs by any grub of a gardener, unless it were Father Adam himself, was a thing he could not bring his mind to face. However, as some compensation, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which was, as everybody must acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to civilized society. As he had made many a fireballoon, and had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down cats by parachutes, it was not very difficult to fly downwards from moderate elevations. But, as he was reproached by my sister for never flying back again, which, however, was a far different thing, he refused, under such poor encouragement, to try his winged parachutes any more, either "aloft or alow," till he had thoroughly studied Bishop Wilkins on the art of translating right reverend gentlemen to the moon; and, in the meantime, he resumed his general lectures on physics.

From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister Mary's. He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother-in subsequent times a little middy on board many a ship of H. M., and the most predestined rebel upon earth against all assumptions, small or great, of superiority-she arranged a

mutiny, that had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguishing the lectures for ever. He had happened to say, which was no unusual thing with him, that he flattered himself he had made the point under discussion tolerably clear; " clear," he added, bowing round the half-circle of us, the audience, "to the meanest of capacities ;" and then he repeated, sonorously, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities." Upon which a voice, a female voice-but whose voice, in the tumult that followed, I did not distinguish— retorted, "No, you haven't; it's as dark as sin;' and then, without a moment's interval, a second voice exclaimed, "Dark as night;" then came my younger brother's insurrectionary yell, "Dark as midnight;" then another female voice chimed in melodiously, "Dark as pitch;" and so the peal continued to come round like a catch, the whole being so well concerted, and the rolling fire so well sustained, that it was impossible to make head against it; whilst the abruptness of the interruption gave to it the protecting character of an oral "round-robin," it being impossible to challenge any one in particular as the ringleader. Burke's phrase of "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in everybody's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows, that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish

multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of some lurking consideration for the two young strangers. We all laughed in chorus at this parting salute; my brother at last condescended to join us ; but there ended the course of lectures on natural philosophy. T. De Quincey.

XLVI.

SKIPPER IRESON'S RIDE.

Of all the rides since the birth of time,
Told in story or sung in rhyme,—
On Apuleius's golden ass,

Or one-eyed Calendar's horse of brass,
Witch astride of a human back,
Islam's prophet on Al-Borák,-

The strangest ride that ever was sped
Was Ireson's, out from Marblehead !
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead !

Body of turkey, head of owl,
Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl,
Feathered and ruffled in every part,
Skipper Ireson stood in the cart;
Scores of women, old and young,
Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue,