and in her broad pronunciation the hegg was
converted into a hag. Nevertheless, she
insisted in her prescription being followed;
and the patient recovered, partly from its
material influence, but mainly from the moral
stimulus imparted by the fun of first
swallowing a wig (taking the hair), and then
boiling a witch (or heating a hag).

A respectable tradesman, from London,
had transplanted himself, and had taken root
in a populous provincial town, where he
largely manufactured, advertised, puffed, and
sold, matchless anti-eructative sausages. The
sausages were good, and were anti-eruc—.
Mr. Greentree's friends guessed that he put a
little chalk and magnesia into them, himself
talked grandly of an antibilious receipt, which
he had purchased of a court physician at a
ruinous outlay. His morning toil of
compounding mincemeat was solaced every
evening by the sweet converse of the porter-
room hard by, where Mr. G. was rather
looked up to than otherwise. During the
day, the sausage-chopping machine did its
work, as right as the mail; and as punctually
as the cathedral clock struck seven, entered
Mr. Greentree, to unbend his bow and wet
his whistle. One summer evening, at half-
past seven, no G.; at a quarter to eight, still
no G. At five minutes to eight, in rushed
G's ghost, pale, trembling, perspiring, and
faint. He called for a pot of porter, to save
his life.

"What is the matter?" sung the company,
in unison.

"O!" panted Greentree, redivivus a
little; "I vent hout to take a valk; and
before I could get 'ome again, I was tossed
into an A-field, over an 'oily edge, by an
'orrid cow."

Not all the virtues of his sausages could
earn for poor Greentree a grain of
condolence.

Be not deceived, therefore, ye who suicidally
murder your mother-tongue; your
crime acts as a neutraliser to all your
respectability, and throws a wet blanket over your
every talent and your every virtue. In vain
will you drive your carriage-and-pair, if you
talk loudly about your pheayton, which you
bought from seeing a hadvertisement in the
Times; your temperance will be unavailing
to edify your neighbours, if you make tea
either with a kittle or a hurn; your philanthropy
will be only mocked at, if you profess
that you are not crule-earted; your fortune
will be scorned, when you reelize it; you
will travel in vain, if your hobject is to wisit
the Watican, and hadmire the Hantinous.
Your darling boys and girls, though ever so
smartly dressed, will fruitlessly invite their
playfellows to spend the evening, if they
state that they must go 'ome to the 'ouse, to
'ave dessert with their parr and their marr.

Surely, when we have only six-and-twenty
letters to manage, the task is not so herculean
to set each its proper work to do, and
to keep them all in their proper places
If we had five-and-thirty, like the Russians,
we might claim a little excuse for occasional
misdirections. People who will not mould
their throat and tongue to give the sounds of h
and r, should be condemned to short commons
till they can pronounce the Sclavonic letter
III, or chtcha; or they might like to take to
the study of Chinese, a language whose words
show no indication of number, gender, case,
declension, or conjugation, but which is not
a bit the easier for that. One European
dialect (the Venetian) would exactly suit
the vocal organs of our indolent talkers: it
cuts out all the consonants, and leaves only
the vowels. A discussion between a couple
of gondoliers is a flood of a, e, i, o, u, in
inconceivable permutations and combinations.
Goldoni, who wrote comedies in this well-
buttered tongue, uses "siora mare," for
"signora madre," and "fia mia" for "figlia mia."
It appears that an experiment in Venetian
English is to be tried in a forthcoming
Adelphi farce, in which Mr. and Mrs. Malaprop
and all the little Malaprops are to give
a lesson in polished delivery and correct
forms of address, which is sure to be received
with screams of approbation.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

IT is true that the waters of the Canal St.
Martin, which runs through the Old Marais,
at Paris, are neither of the skyeyest blue, nor
of the most pellucid emerald; that no gondola
glides over them; and that no gay gondolier
wakes the heart with his merry song;—it is
true, moreover, that the Canal St. Martin is
used, as we use the Thames, for an open-
air drain; that it is made the receptacle of
the waste waters of dyers, gas-makers, chemical
manufacturers, soap-boilers, and tanners;
that barges of every degree and fashion,
pass and repass along it continually; that a
population of a nondescript character—neither
landsmen nor watermen; neither citizens nor
boors—dwell on its surface or swarm upon
its banks, clad in heavy dirty habiliments,
hustling one another about, and shouting
furiously; and that sometimes a wall of fog
barricades the houses on one side of the
quay, from the view of the houses on the
other.

I came to Paris very young, passed my
apprenticeship here, and am now foreman in one
of the manufactories which convert my
favourite canal into a Styx. Number twenty-
seven Rue Ménilmontant is a corner house,
facing, on one side, the street of that name;
on the other is the quay. For eight years
I have lived in an apartment commanding
both views.

Opposite number twenty-seven is number
twenty-six, for the streets in Paris are
wisely distinguished by the odd numbers on
one side and the even numbers on the other;
and in the troisième étage of that house, and