to take down a dish of meat, and to 'eat it
and bring it up again, when it was a little
'otter: that these atrocities are unbearable;
that poor letter H cannot stand it any longer;
that he, therefore, calls on his little comrades
the vowels, to hold a meeting, and see if they
and he cannot do something in concert
together to stop the mockeries they receive in
common, and also to prevent the thousands
who mock them from being laughed at
themselves, and thought nothing of. Fancy the
Queen calling for the 'Igh Steward of her
'Ousehold; or the Prince Albert 'oping that
Hadmiral Dundas would not hannihilate the
Russian fleet, which he kindly 'asn't! H's
idea is good and laudable; but the restitution
and reparation of injuries is easier in theory
than it proves in practice.

It has been remarked that it would be an
excellent lesson to see ourselves as others see us;
and, this mode of instruction would be
considerably extended, if we could hear ourselves as
others hear us. "My dear girls," said a
managing matron, who always thought everybody
wrong but herself; "what an 'abit you
'ave got of dropping your aitches!" She, good
soul, had no idea of being referred to Æsop's
fables, to study the anecdote of the mother-
crab and her daughter. She would have
been astonished if Mr. Punch, with his
politest bow, had presented her with an enormous
capital H, on a sheet of card, with the
observation, "I beg your pardon, madam,
but I fear that you have yourself dropped
this!" The worst of dropping letters
habitually for too long a period is, that it is not
easy to pick them up again. Certain vocal
organs, for want of training and exercise, at
last become utterly paralysed. Even in the
case of life and death, we know that not
every Ephraimite could pronounce the
Shibboleth. I have heard cockneys gasping to
get out an H, and unable to do it.

"'Tis a lovely morning, Tom," said my
cousin Westendish (a native Londoner for
three generations past); " I'll drive you to
'Ighgate in my 'orse and chaise."

"You shall," I replied, "when you can say
Highgate and horse; but I am not going to
sit in public by the side of a fellow who can't
pronounce his alphabet."

"Nonsense, Tom; I can say 'orse. There;
wawse! And there (coughing), o-o-orse and
'Ighgate. What would you 'ave, I should
like to know?"

The want of a defensive aspirate exposeth
a man to many hard hits.

"My 'orse is very 'ot," observed a fashionable
confectioner, at the conclusion of a hunt
wherein he had risked his tongue as well as
his neck.

"Very 'ot, is he?" said a bystander;
"then you'd better hice him."

"Pray, sir," asked a cross-eyed youth, who
ran down by the train to look at the sea;
"pray, sir, is it 'igh water 'ere?"

"Yes, young gentleman, it is eye-water,"
growled Mr. Raspirator, "and I advise you to
use some of it to cure your squint."

In the weekly rotation of our bill of fare
at Mr. Mashup's boarding-school, Friday was
the day dedicated to pies and hashes. Though
the pie and the hash smelt and tasted exactly
the same, still pie was the almost universal
favourite. To be sure, you got a slice of
crust (a good thick one) to boot; but that
was not the reason of the preference. The
secret motive lay in the chance you had of
recovering the pie bones which you had
marked with your knife during the previous
week. There, was the excitement of a lottery
in asking for pie. The attention of the boys
on your right and left was riveted on your
plate to see whether you had drawn a prize
or a blank. Still there were a few cold-
blooded and backward boys for whom betting
on the resurrection of bones had but feeble
charms as a means of sport. One Friday,
Mrs. Mashup was carving away. "Which do-
you choose, Tucketin,—pie or hash?"

"'Ash, mem, please," said Tucketin,
unwittingly.

"Ash!—ash! What do you mean by
ash? There is no such thing as ash in Mr.
Mashup's establishment. You deserve a
good ash-stick on your back; and I shall
report the shocking expression immediately
after dinner, master Tucketin."

Now, Mr. Mashup, before turning schoolmaster
—all schoolmasters have 'turned from
something else, which they couldn't get on
with elsewhere—had been a country actor, in
which glorified state he had smitten Mrs.
M.'s heart. Tradition reported him to have
appeared on the stage in the shape of a
walking gentleman; calumny insinuated that
he was only a stick—an upright bit of wood
with a round knob at the top. Never mind
that: he had been an actor; he read well
himself, and he made us read and speak
distinctly and accurately. Mrs. M.'s pun told,
and so did her denunciation. We had no
more 'ash from that day forward; though we
had plenty of hashes, and pies, and bones,
which bore the tokens of auld lang syne.

John Kemble astonished Covent Garden
pit, by insisting on completing the metre of a
Shaksperian line by pronouncing the word
aches—pains, as if it had been h's. The
amount of ear-ache caused by the letter h,
both by its absence and its uncalled-for
intrusion, between that time and this, is
incalculable. But, as the toad, ugly and
venomous, bears yet a precious jewel in
her head, so have I known the
misdemeanours of a letter, productive of
beneficial and sanitary effects. A lady in a
depressed and exhausted state of health, after
the doctors had shaken their heads, was
recommended as a remedy by her good old
nurse, to walk out in the garden "to take the
morning hair, and then to come in and heat a
hegg for breakfast." Nurse's vowels were no
more irreproachable than her consonants;