any dead body of man or beast left in the
Bush. I sold Moonlight for India—he was too
good a horse for my rough work. In India
he soon rose to merited distinction, and
trotted about with a Governor-general upon
his back."

DUMBLEDOWNDEARY.

Down in the pleasant Kentish county,
where there are hops, and apples, and ruddy
women; where an unobtrusive little railway
runs through luscious orchards of pears and
cherries, and gooseberry-bushes so overburdened
with juicy fruit as to require little
crutches for the support of the laden
branches; where fat little meadows, in which
fat cattle graze, are intersected by those green
lanes so pleasant to the English eye, and which
you will find in no other country save this our
England; where, all day long, " the lyric
choristers," as good Master Donne calls them—
"the lyric lark, the grave whispering dove,
and the household bird with the red
tomacher," are blithe subscribers to Nature's
great Sacred Harmonic Society; where there
are May-meetings of bees, humming and
buzzing quite as much (and quite as profitably,
perhaps,) as some of your London May-meeters;
where, mount to whatever eminence you will,
the horizon bounds for you on every side
one great English garden, with the river
Thames, innocent of dead dogs hereabout,
running through the midst—down in this
pleasant smiling land, where you could almost
imagine that such things as poor-rates were
unknown (but they are not), I light upon a
town. A little town it is, though of considerable
pretensions—a town that means to do
a great deal some day, but has not done much
yet—an embryo town grown out of an obsolete
village—a baby town in brick long clothes,
with a bedridden old grandfather dozing in a
cottage by the river-side. Shall I be accused
of personality if I call it Dumbledowndeary?
I hope not.

My town, like Beau Brummel's valet, has
had its failures. It is on the famous Thames
river, and tried hard, once, to be a watering-
place. It came out with a pier, a Pier Hotel,
a bazaar, and a pleasure-garden; but the soil,
I suppose, was not favourable to the growth
of shrimps, crusty bread and butter, donkies,
circulating libraries, and other productions of
a quasi-marine watering-place; and it came to
naught. There is nothing but a blurred bill
pasted on a pump to tell of the bazaar that
was; the steamboat, though it still calls at
the pier-head, takes up and lands but very
few passengers, and the Pier Hotel has been
numbered long since in the great category of
"Houses to let."

Dumbledowndeary afterwards tried the coal
trade, which showed a sanguine and commerce-
loving temperament on the part of its
inhabitants; but, as there were no coal-fields in
the neighbourhood, and very few coal
purchasers (the bulk of the population preferring
to use, as fuel, sticks from the hedges, portions
of barges past service, and any stray bits
of their own houses or furniture that came
handy), the import and export trade in black
diamonds never became very brisk. A timid
little collier loiters about an out-of-the-way
creek sometimes, but she never seems to load
or to discharge cargo; and in the window of
the grocer's shop (which also serves as a
post-office) you may see, from month's end to
month's end, faded letters addressed to collier
captains, which letters have been there so
long, and have grown so yellow and so
flyblown, that I am inclined to think the
commanders to whom they are addressed must all
be first cousins, or bosom friends of Captain
Vanderdecken, and have never been able to
double the Cape yet, and come and fetch
them.

These, with a frantic though puny attempt
to do something in the boat and barge-building
line, and an impotent plunge into the mash-
tub, with a view to the brewing of strong ale,
have been among the failures of Dumble-
downdeary.

Suddenly, however, she (Dumbledowndeary)
had a mission. Everybody has a mission
now-a-days—actors, authors, commercial
travellers; and my town had hers. She
discovered that her mission was Bricks. The
Dumbledowndereans threw themselves upon
bricks with an ardour and an intensity of
purpose really surprising; and it is doubtless due
to their extensive operations and speculations
in bricks that there are so many brick-fields
and so many brick-barges in Dumbledown-
deary—so many brickmakers, bricklayers, and
bargees—and more especially, that
Dumbledowndeary may be called without much
exaggeration a Town to Let.

Before I treat of the yet infant town, I may
be allowed to take a bird's-eye view of the
ancestor of this brick-baby, the old town, or,
rather, village of Dumbledowndeary. It is not
extensive. It has no market-place, parks,
squares, or fountains; nor has it, with the
exception of a church, a charity-school, and a
cage, any public buildings. It has a "common
hard," a straggling street, a back lane, and
there an end. Public-houses are pretty
numerous. There is no gas out of doors. There
are three policemen who appear to pass their
time in the consumption of tea under the
shadow of their sergeant, or in inviting him, in
rotation, to the same social meal. These
members of the force are all, I opine, modest and
reserved men, averse to mixing much in public.
I have, indeed, never set eyes upon one of
them during a fortnight's sojourn; but, as I
occasionally see a little chubby boy, three
years old, with whom I have a pat-on-the-
head acquaintance, riding cock-horse to
Coventry on a formidable looking cutlass with a
brass hilt, and which he says is " father's," I
conjecture that the police are accustomed to
the use of weapons; and that, although