be seen elsewhere, we are unable to say. The
White Woman is her name. She is dressed
entirely in white, with a ghastly white plaiting
round her head and face, inside her white
bonnet. She even carries (we hope) a white
umbrella. With white boots, we know she
picks her way through the winter dirt. She
is a conceited old creature, cold and formal in
manner, and evidently went simpering mad
on personal grounds alone—no doubt because
a wealthy Quaker wouldn't marry her.
This is her bridal dress. She is always
walking up here, on her way to church to
marry the false Quaker. We observe in her
mincing step and fishy eye that she intends
to lead him a sharp life. We stopped growing
when we got at the conclusion that the Quaker
had had a happy escape of the White Woman.

We have never outgrown the rugged walls
of Newgate, or any other prison on the
outside. All within, is still the same blank of
remorse and misery. We have never
outgrown Baron Trenck, Among foreign
fortifications, trenches, counterscarps, bastions,
sentries, and what not, we always have him.
filing at his chains down in some arched
darkness far below, or taming the spiders to
keep him company. We have never outgrown
the wicked old Bastille. Here, in our mind
at this present childish moment, is a distinct
groundplan (wholly imaginative and resting
on no sort of authority), of a maze of low
vaulted passages with small black doors; and
here, inside of this remote floor on the left,
where the black cobwebs hang like a veil
from the arch, and the jailer's lamp will
scarcely burn, was shut up, in black silence
through so many years, that old man of the
affecting anecdote, who was at last set free.
But, who brought his white face, and his
white hair, and his phantom figure, back
again, to tell them what they had made him
—how he had no wife, no child, no friend, no
recognition of the light and air—and prayed
to be shut up in his old dungeon till he died.

We received our earliest and most enduring
impressions among barracks and soldiers, and
ships and sailors. We have outgrown no
story of voyage and travel, no love of
adventure, no ardent interest in voyagers and
travellers. We have outgrown no country
inn—roadside, in the market-place, or on a
solitary heath; no country landscape, no
windy hill side, no old manor-house, no
haunted place of any degree, not a drop in
the sounding sea. Though we are equal
(on strong provocation) to the Lancers, and
may be heard of in the Polka, we have not
outgrown Sir Roger de Coverley, or any
country dance in the music-book. We hope
we have not outgrown the capacity of being
easily pleased with what is meant to please us,
or the simple folly of being gay upon occasion
without the least regard to being grand.

Right thankful we are to have stopped in
our growth at so many points—for each of
these has a train of its own belonging to it—
and particularly with the Old Year going out
and the New Year coming in. Let none of us
be ashamed, to feel this gratitude. If we can
only preserve ourselves from growing up, we
shall never grow old, and the young may love
us to the last. Not to be too wise, not to be
too stately, not to be too rough with innocent
fancies, or to treat them with too much
lightness—which is as bad—are points to be
remembered that may do us all good in our
years to come. And the good they do us, may
even stretch forth into the vast expanse
beyond those years; for, this is the spirit
inculcated by One on whose knees children sat
confidingly, and from whom all our years
dated.

FRENCH NATIONAL DEFENCES.

"BURN my shoes! " is an imprecation
which implies its utterer to be as unrelenting
in his evil intentions as the principal actors
in those horrid cases, where the victims of
murder are consumed by fire, after having
been deprived of life. To burn a man's
shoes is hardly easier than to burn his body.
Successful instances of such atrocity must
happily be rare, from the very nature of the
material. I knew one female, however, whom
the green-eyed monster sometimes excited
to throw her husband's best walking shoes
upon the back of the fire, whenever, in one
of her paroxysms, she suspected he was about
to pay a visit to the neighbouring town;
but it is scarcely credible that she
contrived to burn them utterly out of the way.
She might scorch and torture them, making
them writhe and shrink over the blazing
coals; but without a furnace seven times
heated, there still would remain blackened
fragments in evidence of her criminal folly.
If the object of this quaint form of self-
commination was to convey to the mind a
complete destruction and disappearance of
the articles imprecated, the words should
have been, not " Burn my shoes! " but,
"Burn my sabots! " That would have
implied something like utter extermination and
"chawing up."

Now there exists, south of the English
Channel, a powerful and populous nation, the
great majority of whose appendages to their
feet are extremely liable to be burnt. Sabot
is a French word, which our dictionaries
interpret to mean " wooden shoes; " and in
the present paper I shall make use of the
original term by which the original subject
of it is called—not for the sake of affecting
to employ foreign words, and so making a
poor exhibition of superficial learning—but,
both because it is shorter and simpler than
its English representatives, and because they
give only an imperfect idea of the thing itself.
A sabot is a sabot, and not a wooden shoe,
although it is a thing made of wood to be
worn by the feet of human creatures for the
sake of warmth and defence. A sabot is no