But just as we launched a sour-faced man
Came tow'rds us, biting his lips, and bade
The noisy Frenchmen, who after him ran,
" Pull out at once." Well, they were afraid;
Still they tumbled in in their bragging way,
Shouting their gibberish loud enough,
But half way came a wave at play,
And the lubbers were not of a right good stuff.

So they turned, and left the men to drown;
Then we went mad at that, and raced
For the boat at the other end of the town;
And we ferried across, but the fools, disgraced,
Would not bring the key, and were sullen and glum.
So we tore down the rails, which did quite as well,
And launched the boat, and were cool and dumb,
Till we pulled away for that foaming hell.

How loud they cheered from the pier and sands
As we shot like a sea bird to the wreck;
Our hearts were good, but how weak our hands;
Waves do not yield to a coxswain's beck.
A cruel sea struck our staggering boat,
A moment, and half of us had gone,
And I and some others, on oars afloat,
Saw the careless wave roll roaring on.

But English are English, come what may;
And life to them is a paltry thing
Compared with duty; so quickly they
Pushed off while we were still struggling;
And rescuing all that were left, again
They pulled through the racing rolling tide,
And saved the last Frenchman, whose worn weak brain
Had turned when his friends had slowly died.

And the Sunday morning, when all was calm,
Our steam-boat left with the five dead men,
And half way across we sang a psalm
Beside the row of coffins, and then
The captain read us a chapter or two,
Till presently up the white cliffs came;
But not for them, the brave and true,
Who put the Calais men to shame.

NEW UNCOMMERCIAL SAMPLES.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.
A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE.

ONE day this last Whitsuntide, at
precisely eleven o'clock in the forenoon, there
suddenly rode into the field of view
commanded by the windows of my lodging, an
equestrian phenomenon. It was a fellow-
creature on horseback, dressed in the
absurdest manner. The fellow-creature wore
high boots, some other (and much larger)
fellow-creature's breeches, of a slack-baked
doughy colour and a baggy form, a blue
shirt whereof the skirt or tail was puffily
tucked into the waistband of the said
breeches, no coat, a red shoulder- belt,
and a demi- semi- military scarlet hat
with a feathered ornament in front, which
to the uninstructed human vision had the
appearance of a moulting shuttlecock. I
laid down the newspaper with which I had
been occupied, and surveyed the fellow-
man in question, with astonishment.
Whether he had been sitting to any painter
as a frontispiece for a new edition of
Sartor Resartus; whether " the husk or
shell of him," as the esteemed Herr
Teufelsdroch might put it, were founded on a
jockey, on a circus, on General Garibaldi,
on cheap porcelain, on a toy-shop, on Guy
Fawkes, on Wax-Work, on Gold Digging,
on Bedlam, or on all, were doubts that
greatly exercised my mind. Meanwhile my
fellow-man stumbled and slided, excessively
against his will, on the slippery stones of my
Covent Garden street, and elicited shrieks
from several sympathetic females, by
convulsively restraining himself from pitching
over his horse's head. In the very crisis of
these evolutions, and indeed at the trying
moment when his charger's tail was in a
tobacconist's shop, and his head anywhere
about town, this cavalier was joined by
two similar portents, who, likewise stumbling
and sliding, caused him to stumble
and slide the more distressingly. At length
this Gilpinian triumvirate effected a halt,
and, looking northward, waved their three
right hands as commanding unseen troops
to Up guards and at 'em. Hereupon a
brazen band burst forth, which caused them
to be instantly bolted with to some remote
spot of earth in the direction of the Surrey
Hills.

Judging from these appearances that a
procession was under way, I threw up my
window, and, craning out, had the satisfaction
of beholding it advancing along the
street. It was a Tee-Total procession, as
I learnt from its banners, and was long
enough to consume twenty minutes in passing.
There were a great number of children
in it, some of them so very young
in their mothers' arms as to be in the act
of practically exemplifying their abstinence
from fermented liquors, and attachment to
an unintoxicating drink, while the
procession defiled. The display was, on the
whole, pleasant to see, as any good-
humoured holiday assemblage of clean,
cheerful, and well-conducted people should
be. It was bright with ribbons, tinsel, and
shoulder-belts, and abounded in flowers,
as if those latter trophies had come up
in profusion under much watering. The
day being breezy, the insubordination of
the large banners was very reprehensible.
Each of these, being borne aloft on two
poles and stayed with some half dozen lines,
was carried, as polite books in the last
century used to be written, by "various
hands," and the anxiety expressed in the
upturned faces of those officers—something
between the anxiety attendant on the
balancing art, and that inseparable from the