campaign of the allied English and French armies
in sixteen hundred and fifty-six— seven." Or,
" our readers will be pleased to learn that it
was the proud privilege of our worthy host,
Bootjohn, of the Royal Leathers hotel, to
confer a considerable obligation upon the present
ruler of the French nation some years since.
The illustrious personage who was then
staying at the Royal Leathers, being in temporary
difficulties, Bootjohn not only forgave him the
amount of his score, but also, and without
the least hope of return, lent him one and
ninepence and a clean shirt. We rejoice to
learn that the whole amount has been most
honourably repaid by h—s  I— p—l  M—j— y :
the remittance being accompanied by a highly
flattering autograph letter from N— p— n the
Third."

There is also at this present moment a
highly favourite little chanticleer crowing
most lustily, and attributing English, Scotch,
or Irish extraction, and even existing relatives,
to the imperial family of France, their generals,
courtiers, and dependents. Thus, we
have been informed (Slugborough Herald)
that the Empress's maternal uncle is now
residing as a cheese and bacon factor at
Epidermisnock, Argyleshire. It may be interesting
to know (Foggington Courier) that the
present Emperor of F— e was clandestinely
married in eighteen hundred and thirty-six
to Miss Chilian Pickles of this town. The
I— p—l bride died soon after the incarceration
of her adventurous husband in the
citadel of H— m; but four children, the
offspring of the marriage, are yet alive, two of
whom are receiving a brilliant though solid
education at the establishment of the Misses
W— , not a hundred miles from here.

As to our own beloved Sovereign, the
chanticleers that go the round of the papers are
innumerable and unnumbered. The Queen enters
Highland cottages; eats bannocks; tastes
the whisky (the real Glenlivet, as the
historian takes care to inform us); adopts
children, and pensions octogenarians. She
asks the way down by-lanes and across
commons of country boys, and slips sovereigns
into their hands when she leaves them; writes
Victoria with a diamond ring upon cottage
window-panes, and makes anonymous
watercolour drawings in the albums of private
families. As to Prince Albert, he carries
schoolboys pickaback, makes the Prince of
Wales (with some touching moral remarks)
present his patent leather shoes to a beggar,
and matches his cob against the trotting pony
of a butcher (whom he meets of course
accidentally, and who addresses him, unconscious
of his exalted rank, as Governor), and whom
he beats in the race triumphantly.

Multitudes of other chanticleers there be,
to which I can but barely allude. The gallant
gay Lotharios who elope with the lady of a
highly respected baronet, to the consternation
of the county and the ultimate employment
of the gentlemen of the long robe; the heartless
monsters who marry four different young
ladies at four different churches on the same
day ; the would-be Benedicks who advertise
for a wife— a lady having a small independence
—and are entrapped into correspondence
with gentlemen writing disguised female
hands, and make appointments and keep
them, and are ultimately brought to great
shame and ridicule ; the faithless swains who
leave their intended brides at the church-door,
and bolt off to Australia ; the brutes
who eat two legs of mutton, half a dozen
live rats, and a pound of candles, for a wager ;
the criminals who were hanged twenty years
ago, and are now alive and universally
respected in Lower Canada ; the railway
navvies who come into fortunes of fifty
thousand pounds, and immediately go mad with
joy ; the gentleman wearing eight watch-chains,
who is continually travelling up and
down the London and North Western Railway ;
the stingy nobleman at a fashionable
watering-place, whose wife is saved from
drowning by an honest boatman, and who
recompenses the hardy son of Neptune with
twopence ; the nonogenarian paupers whose
demise is recorded under the heading, " Death
of a character ;" the cuckoos that sing so early
and the blackbirds that sing so late ; the
weather which is so astonishingly mild, and the
Swedish turnips that have attained so
extraordinary a size : these are a few of the
newspaper chanticleers. They are, in a general
way, harmless enough. And if the country
newspapers who pay that Cochin-China
chanticleer, " Our London Correspondent "
for his weekly letter, find their account in
it, so be it. I never knew him to be right
about anything; but he may be, some day.

A VERY LITTLE TOWN.

WE live (my aunt and I) in a very little
town somewhere, through which, once upon
a time, ninety stage-coaches daily passed to
London, and where now hardly one public
conveyance of any sort is ever seen; where,
once upon a time, the great big inn was kept
by a great big landlord (as I have heard), who
received some very great people at his door;
where post-horses were kept, and where
carriages and four were quite a common sight;
but where now there is nothing but emptiness
and solitude. The great inn yard-gate grows
rusty on its hinges, and the stable windows are
all broken, dirty, and full of cobwebs; the
inn-door is closely padlocked, and all its
windows are black and bare, as if every one
inside were dead and all the linen had been
sent to the wash. The sign of the British Lion,
standing erect on one hind leg, like a ballet-
dancer, threatens to fall from its supporters
every windy night; so does the great kitchen
chimney; and moss grows on the hearthstones
in the great big bed-rooms, with the
great big beds in which the very great people
slept, once upon a time.