- rangements, I say, with the landlord, respecting fixtures,-very necessary things to be considered in a young man about to settle in the world, though not very accordant with the impatient state of my then passions, - some obstacles about the valuation of the fixtures, — had hitherto precluded (and I shall always think providentially) my final closes with his offer, when one of those accidents, which, unimportant in themselves, often arise to give a turn to the most serious intentions of our life, intervened, and put an end at once to my projects of wiving and of housekeeping. I was never much given to theatrical entertainments, that is, at no time of my life was I ever what they call a regular play-goer; but on some occasion of a benefit-night, which was expected to be very productive, and indeed turned out so, Cleora expressing a desire to be present, I could do no less than offer, as I did very willingly, to squire her and her mother to the pit. At that time it was not customary in our town for tradesfolk, except some of the very topping ones, to sit, as they now do, in the boxes. At the time appointed I waited upon the ladies, who had brought with them a young man, a distant relation, whom it seems they had invited to be of the party. This a little disconcerted me, as I had about me barely silver enough to pay for our three selves at the door, and did not at first know that their relation had proposed paying for himself. However, to do the young man justice, he not only paid for himself, but for the old lady besides, leaving me only to pay for two, as it were. In our passage to the theatre, the notice of Cleora was attracted to some orange- wenches that stood about the doors vending their commodities. She was leaning on my arm; and I could feel her every now and then giving me a nudge, as it is called, which I afterwards discovered were hints that I should buy some oranges. It seems, it is a custom at Birmingham, and perhaps in other places, when a gentleman treats ladies to the play, especially when a full night is expected, and that the house will be inconveniently warm, to provide them with this kind of fruit, oranges being esteemed for their cooling property. But how could I guess at that, never having treated ladies to a play before, and being, as I said, quite a novice at these kind of entertainments? At last she spoke plain out, and begged that I would buy some of "those oranges," pointing to a particular barrow. But when I came to examine the fruit, I did not think that the quality of it was answerable to the price. In this way I handled several baskets of them; but something in them all displeased me. Some had thin rinds, and some were plainly over-ripe, which is as great a fault as not being ripe enough; and I could not (what they call) make a bargain. While I stood haggling with the women, secretly determining to put off my purchase till I should get within the theatre, where I expected we should have better choice, the young man, the cousin, (who, it seems, had left us without my missing him,) came running to us with his pockets stuffed out with oranges, inside and out, as they say. It seems, not liking the look of the barrow-fruit any more than myself, he had slipped away to an eminent fruiterer's, about three doors distant, which I never had the sense to think of, and had laid out a matter of two shillings in some of the best St. Michael's, I think, I ever tasted. What a little hinge, as I said before, the most important affairs in life may turn upon! The mere inadvertence to the fact that there was an eminent fruiterer's within three doors of us, though we had just passed it without the thought once occurring to me, which he had taken advantage of, lost me the affections of my Cleora. From that time she visibly cooled towards me, and her partiality was as visibly transferred to this cousin. I was long unable to account for this change in her behavior; when one day, accidentally discoursing of oranges to my mother, alone, she let drop a sort of reproach to me, as if I had offended Cleora by my nearness, as she called it, that evening. Even now, when Cleora has been wedded some years to that same officious relation, as I may call him, I can hardly be persuaded that such a trifle could have been the motive to her inconstancy; for could she suppose that I would sacrifice my dearest hopes in her to the paltry sum of two shillings, when I was going to treat her to the play, and her mother too, (an expense of more than four times that amount,) if the young man had not interfered to pay for the latter, as I mentioned? But the caprices of the sex are past finding out: and I begin to think my mother was in the right; for doubtless women know women better than we can pretend to know them. WORKS AND DAYS. "Ritorna a tua scienza! Che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta, Più senta il bene, e così la doglienza." -DANTE. RECORD, O Muse! and let the record stand, Ye sacred shades where Silliman made gray Good names be these! good names to stand with his, — When sage Timotheus woke the Western lyre Declare now, Clio! 'mid this gifted band, for us a mighty void! Yet well for him, for he was best employed High on his tented mountain's breezy slope, Might but those maidens meet him — Health and Hope! Yet wouldst thou know who stood superior there, Choose thine own monarch! either well might reign! Now shut the gates, the fields have drunk enough No more one bard, exempt from vulgar throng, With the wild clangor of the warlike horn, NEW HAVEN, August 8. PAUL JONES AND DENIS DUVAL. INGHAM and his wife have a habit of coming in to spend the evening with us, unless we go there, or unless we both go to Haliburton's, or unless there is something better to do elsewhere. We talk, or we play besique, or Mrs. Haliburton sings, or we sit on the stoup and hear the crickets sing; but when there is a new Trollope or Thackeray, - alas, there will never be another new Thackeray !—all else has always been set aside till we have read that aloud. When I began the last sentence of the last Thackeray that ever was written, Ingham jumped out of his seat, and cried, So I read on to the sudden end: "We had been sent for in order to protect a fleet of merchantmen that were bound to the Baltic, and were to sail under the convoy of our ship and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Captain Piercy. And thus it came about, that, after being twentyfive days in His Majesty's service, I had the fortune to be present at one of the most severe and desperate combats that have been fought in our or in any time. "I shall not attempt to tell that story of the battle of the 23d of September, which ended in our glorious captain striking his own colors to our superior and irresistible enemy." (This enemy, as Mr. Thackeray has just said, is "Monsieur John Paul Jones, afterwards Knight of His Most Christian Majesty's Order of Merit.") "Sir Richard [Pearson, of the English frigate Serapis] has told the story of his disaster in words nobler than any I could supply, who, though indeed engaged in that fatal action, in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his motley crew, saw but a very small por Ingham did not speak for a little while. None of us did. And when we did, it was not to speak of Denis Duval, so much as of the friend we lost, when we lost the monthly letter, or at least, Roundabout Paper, from Mr. Thackeray. How much we had prized him,- how strange it was that there was ever a day when we did not know about him, how strange it was that anybody should call him cynical, or think men must apologize for him: - of such things and of a thousand more we spoke, before we came back to Denis Duval. But he would not be jeered at; he only called us to witness, that, from the first chapter of Denis Duval, he had said the name was familiar, even to the point of looking it out in the Biographical Dictionary; and now that it appeared Duval fought on board the Serapis, he said it all came back to him. His grandfather, his mother's father, was a "volunteer "- boy, preparing to be midshipman, on the Serapis, and he knew he had heard him speak of Duval ! Oh, how we all screamed! It was so like Ingham! Haliburton asked him if his grandfather was not best-man when Denis married Agnes. Fausta asked him * Cornhill Magazine, June, 1864, Vol. IX. p. 654. if he would not continue the novel in the "Cornhill." I said it was well known that the old gentleman advised Montcalm to surrender Quebec, interpreted between Cook and the first Kamehameha, piloted La Pérouse between the Centurion and the Graves in Boston harbor, and called him up with a toast at a school-dinner; —that I did not doubt, therefore, that it was all right, and that he and Duval had sworn eternal friendship in their boyhood, and now formed one constellation in the southern hemisphere. But after we had all done, Ingham offered to bet Newport for the Six that he would substantiate what he said. This is by far the most tremendous wager in our little company; it is never offered, unless there be certainty to back it; it is, therefore, never accepted; and the nearest approach we have ever made to Newport, as a company, was one afternoon when we went to South-Boston Point in the horse-car, and found the tide down. Silence reigned, therefore, and the subject changed. "Toney is offe on leave. So the French boy was in oure watch. He is not a French boy. His name is Doovarl." In the midst of a great deal about the mess, and the fellows, and the boys, and the others, and an inexplicable fuss there is about a speculation the mess entered into with some illicit dealer for an additional supply, not of liquor, but of sugar, The next night we were at Ingham's. He unlocked a ravishing old black mahogany secretary he has, and produced a pile of parchment-covered books of different sizes, which were diaries of old Captain Heddart's. They were often called log-books, but, though in later years kept on paper ruled for log-books, and often following to a certain extent the indications of the columns, they were almost wholly personal, and sometimes ran a hundred pages without alluding which I believe was detected, and at all to the ship on which he wrote. Well! the earliest of these was by far the most elegant in appearance. My eyes watered a little, as Ingham showed me on the first page, in the stiff Italian hand which our grandmothers wrote in, when they aspired to elegance, the dedication, "TO MY DEAR FRANCIS, who will write something here every day, because he loves his MOTHER." which covers pages of badly written and worse spelled manuscript, not another distinct allusion to the French boy,—not near so much as to Toney or Wimple or Scroop, or big Wallis or little Wallis. Ingham had painfully toiled through it all, and I did after him. But in another volume, written years after, at a time when the young officer wrote a much more rapid, though scarcely more legible hand, he found a long account of an examination appointed to pass midshipmen, and, to our great delight, as it began, That old English gentleman, whom I this exclamation: |