looks up from his top on the pavement, or
the girl from her doll at the window, while
the stately ranks sweep by, through the
gateway and over the drawbridge and on to
the plain by the sea.  That solemn musical
tramp, the feet all marching like one, seems
here never to cease.  Artillery, regulars,
militia, and these sad-clothed, ill-looking
fellows with the scowl and the metal ring;
they whom the phrenologist and physiologist
give over unto Satan, and the philanthropist
himself despairs of.  Some dwell on board
the hulks in harbour ; but a thousand are
lodged on land here in a prison of iron, light
and strong ; a self-supporting colony, with
tinkers, tailors, blacksmiths, shoemakers,
bakers, bookbinders — all convicts, indeed,
save the chaplain and the doctor ; albeit even
those professions, also, are far from being
unrepresented amongst them.  The newest
improvements ; the secrets which science
charms from the latest moon, are put in
operation to warm, to lodge, to clean, and
to clothe these.  Alas ! it is not till they
have sinned against her, that our country is
thus parental to her children.

The principal streets of Wightmouth are
made up of jewellers' shops, billiard-rooms,
and army and navy tailors; the streets by the
water-side of public-houses and old curiosity
shops.  When his ship is moored in harbour
at last, Jack Robinson is accustomed to dispose
of the spoils of his voyage — pagods and
dried scalps, Russian relics or Carib nose-rings
— to the first bidder, and then to make
himself the merriest of the crew next door.
The slender-waisted, long-haired male population
of this vicinity are accustomed to the use
of ear-rings, and their round hats — like those
of modern ladies — are attached to the extreme
back of their heads by attraction only.  Rag-shops
and flag-shops abound everywhere.

Wightmouth, to judge from the conversation
of its inhabitants, is the great repository
of the choicest secrets of the government.
The question of peace or war has, amongst
us here, been long put past a doubt. "We
shall have war, sir, mark my words; the
war must go on, sir; we shall have war with
France, for the French are jealous of us;
we shall have war with America— and a
very good thing too— or my name's not
Crasher."  Slasher is of the same opinion.
Crasher and Slasher are both anecdotal,
narrators of story.  "When we were in the
Tarantala off Timbuctoo," or "In that affair
with Sandilli in the Paranimposse Valley,"
as the case may be.  Crasher (junior) is for
the most part excitable, illimitably jovial,
and comports himself as under press of canvas.
Slasher (junior), on the contrary, is of
a sublime serene appearance, dressed to oppression,
and awful to the stranger as to the
foe.  But they are both fine open-hearted
fellows.  There is a third order of man
amongst us, and a very good one— the
Slasher-Crasher, or marine; and besides
these three great classes, with their myrmidons
and ministers of different degrees, there
is none in Wightmouth.

A GOLDEN ASS.

IT must have been a very dreary old world,
before there were any story-tellers, or stories,
indeed, to be told.  How the same old world
could have got on without them I am sure I
am at a loss to find out.  When creation was
not old enough for anybody to have a grandfather,
who could tell a delightful fireside
legend of the ghost that appeared to his great-
grandmother ? Events there were to be sure to
be discussed ; murders, marriages, and migrations ;
but of the genuine story, the fiction
grafted upon fact (with occasionally the fact
left out altogether) there must have been a
distressing dearth.  Everything was too true
in those early days— too recent— too freshly
implanted in men's memories for the misty,
vague, "once upon a time " narrative to exist.
But, as the world grew older, there was soon
good store of stories and story-tellers.  It was
soon discovered that the mixture of a lie doth
ever add pleasure— not indeed the lie that
sinketh in— but that harmless fiction that
amuses, and often softens and humanises.  No
doubt many wondrous legends were recounted
after the deluge about some marvellous Ichthyosaurus,
or eccentric Iguanadon, equalling
in wonder the recent American stories of the
Big Bear of Arkansas and the Great Coon of
Michigan.

We have been telling stories ever since.  We
have had the Gesta Romanorum, the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles, the Hundred Merry
Tales, miscalled Shakespeare's, the Contes
de la Reine de Navarre.  Later, the Decameron
of Boccaccio, interminable romances
of Mademoiselle de Scuderi and Mrs. Behn,
leading by degrees into the half dull, half improper
novels of the beginning of the last
century.  But I have nothing to do with
these.  I merely want to cull a story from a
very old story-teller, as old a one, perhaps, as
we possess any authentic record of, who flourished
in the fourth century of the Christian
era, and whose name was Apuleius.  He is
extant still in the Latin of the decline and fall;
and "tall" copies of his magnum opus, the
Golden Ass are yet cherished by old
bibliopoles.  There is an English translation
of him by Sir George Head; but it is neither
in Latin, nor in English that I became acquainted
with him.  It was at the book-stall
on the platform of the Havre and Dieppe
Railway, that I purchased at Paris, the other
day for the moderate sum of one franc, a little
yellow-covered book, which I found to be a
French version of the Contes d'Apulée,
rather a queer guise and place in which to
find my old story-teller of Anno Domini
three hundred and odd.

The Metamorphoses of Apuleius are scarcely
suitable to the more refined taste of modern