rustic had unduly built a pigsty; poor
grunty was turned adrift. At various parts of
the parish boundaries, two or three of the
village boys were 'bumped'—that is, were
swung against a stone wall, tree, post, or any
other hard substance which happened to be
near the parish boundary."

Beating the bounds is not yet quite dead. In
the month of May, in this present year, the
newspapers contained an account of a ceremony
of the kind, performed in Buckinghamshire,
under circumstances which seemed likely to
render an appeal to the law necessary. The
villagers, not well guided by those who
organised the affair, "bumped" boys and men
without their own consent, and were even with
difficulty restrained from bumping the clergyman
himself. At one spot, where the boundary
was marked, they dug a hole in the ground,
and thrust a boy's head into it.

A characteristic compensation for the rooting
up of gospel oaks by railways is the conversion
of certain railway arches into dissenting meeting-
places. These are called "Gospel Arches."

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

WILD BOYS.

THERE is a fine Whateleyan passage in Plato,
or a fine Platonic passage in Whateley, we are
not sure which, that supposes man in this world
to be like a creature shut in a dungeon, with
only two apertures for light and sight. Through
these, and these only, can he derive his
knowledge of the outer world. Through these, and
these only, come all his glimpses of tempests,
sunshine, forests, lakes, seas, valleys, and
mountains; but Death at last enters, breaks down the
dungeon walls, and lets him forth into a freer and
a wider sphere. This is a fine illustration of the
soul's expansion from mortality to immortality.

The transmutation of the savage into the
civilised man is, however, a change scarcely
less extraordinary, and in the last century some
philosophical doctors, both in England and
France, devoted much time to discussions on
this curious branch of moral medicine. Willis
and Chricton in England, and Pinel in France,
carried these studies to great perfection. The
accidental discovery of two wild semi-idiotic
boys, the one in a German forest in 1725, and
the other in a French forest in 1798, enabled
these philosophers to make some practical and
very curious experiments.

In 1725, a boy was found running wild in
the woods near Hamelen. Hamelen is a town
on the Weser, twenty-five miles south-west of
Hanover—our and their George the Second
made a good harbour for the place. Hamelen is
celebrated for its salmon fisheries, its odorous
tanneries, its steaming breweries of rich creamy
beer, its distilleries of strong waters, its
tobacco and pipe manufactories—those
affectionate twin trades. It is famous for all these
things, but still more famous for Robert Browning's
delightfully humorous poem of the Pied
Piper, that droll enchanter who, not being paid
by the cheating corporation of the Hanoverian
town his promised ten thousand guilders for
freeing the place of rats, led off all the children
of the town into a neighbouring hill and there
disappeared with them.

One day, in 1725, that shrewd cynical
king, George the First, having got back for
a time to his beloved country, was out hunting
near Hamelen with his hideous mistresses and
motley court. The huntsmen had wound their
French horns, and ridden deep into the forest of
Hertzwold. There, in a glade, they found and
captured a wild boy, supposed to be about twelve
years old, who had long subsisted in the forest on
roots, leaves, berries, and the bark of trees.
His only costume consisted of part of the collar of
a shirt. The cynical king and his ugly
favourites, all rouge and black wig, gathered
round the boy with extreme curiosity, and
prettily assumed pity. His costume was not
extensive, but what there was of it proved he
had once lived among civilised people. Many
thought he was the child of some fugitive robber
or murderer, who had either died or purposely
abandoned him. Others traced him to the
descendant of some wretch who had fled during
the old devastating German wars, gradually
grown fond of the mere animal life, and bred
up his children as savages. But the general
belief was this: as Hamelen was a town where
criminals were confined to work upon the
fortifications, it was conjectured at Hanover
that Peter (he was christened on the spot)
might be the issue of one of those criminals,
who had either wandered into the woods
and could not find his way back again,
or, being discovered to be an idiot, was
inhumanly turned out by his parent, and left to
perish or shift for himself. In the following
year he was brought over to England by
the order of Queen Caroline, then Princess
of Wales, and put under the care of Dr.
Arbuthnot, with proper masters to attend him.
But, notwithstanding there appeared to be no
natural defect in his organs of speech, after all
the pains that had been taken with him he
could never be brought distinctly to articulate
a single syllable, and proved totally incapable of
receiving any instruction. He was afterwards
entrusted to the care of Mrs. Titchborne, one of
the queen's bedchamber women, with a handsome
pension annexed to the charge. Mrs. Titchborne
usually spending a few weeks every summer
at the house of Mr. James Fenn, a yeoman
farmer at Axter's-end, Hertfordshire, Peter was
left to the care of Mr. Fenn, who was allowed
thirty-five pounds a year for his support and
maintenance. After the death of James Fenn,
he was transferred to the care of his brother,
Thomas Fenn, at another farm-house called
Broadway, where he lived with the several
successive tenants of the farm, and with the
same provision allowed by government to the
time of his death, February 22, 1785, when he
was supposed to be about seventy-two years of
age. Peter was well made and of the middle