parties unmindful of their distance. Over
the line were to be seen the simpering
features of the Reverend Alfred Hoblush,
curate to the Reverend Henry Caiphas; who
found pastoral board and lodging at a real
farmhouse, with practicable churns, tiles,
and stirring platters; which had inside brisk,
pippin-cheeked farmer's daughters, and fresh
new milk and butter, and that sort of thing.
The Reverend gentleman's lively sketches of
Nomade, with which he was always well
furnished, gave great entertainment to the
noble persons who had time to sit at this
board. In this agricultural life he found an
exquisite pleasure; rising with the lark, and
going abroad to the fields with the farmer
and his men. But touching the books and
the book-club all this while?

That idea was engendered in the brain of
the Reverend Alfred Hoblush. It sprang
armed and bristling, digested complete and
nicely organised, from the cerebral pulp of
that gentleman. It was his infant: of him
begotten. Books did reach to this country
through various channels; but they came
only by way of driblets, in a slow trickle.
A new work, of not older date than a double
twelvemonth, has been found lying, like a
meteoric stone in a field, at stray houses,
folk wondering how it got there. But, on the
whole, there was excessive drought in the
land; the wells of light reading were all
dried up; the country was athirst. The
neighbourhood desired to be filled: so the
Reverend Hoblush laid himself to the work.
The whole neighbourhood at once gave in
their adhesion, and moneys were voted
enthusiastically. Was it not, indeed, enough
that the Lady Diana Whilkers had given the
royal assent? whose gentle but imperfectly
furnished bosom this one motive insensibly
swayed in the business; namely, that the
Honourable Agnes Dewlap (at whose routs
in London you may occasionally see the
Lady Diana) writes the divinest novels; the
most marvellous delineations of fashionable
human nature; the most brilliant photographs
of Ton. Pressure of this sort, no doubt,
influences the Lady Diana; especially, as to
qualify for the routs, she has to pass searching
competitive examination in the text books
mentioned; and, on a late occasion, went
nigh to being utterly turned back. Through a
Dewlap cloud, then, she looked at the thing.
Reverend Alfred Hoblush sits at the little
walnut table of her ladyship's boudoir.
There has been a committee appointed, so as
to secure a small working body; and somehow
everybody has gotten upon the committee.
Reverend Alfred Hoblush, then, kindly
consents to act as corresponding secretary,
treasurer, committee-man, working-man; in
short, will do everything. He is now drawing
up the code Hoblush; the library pandects;
and my Lady Diana overlooks the business
from the sofa.

"Plenty of Miss Dewlap's charming things,"
calls my lady, very languidly from the sofa;
"she is the only person worth reading now-
a-days."

"I will take care of that, dear Lady Di,"
responds the Reverend Hoblush, from his
walnut table.

He had put himself in communication with
a famous metropolitan house—the well known
Bowler's—-who, as even street-children
are aware, has near to half a million of
volumes annually undergoing detrition or
light-thumbing process. At the end of the
year, you could get all manner of surplus
copies from. Bowler for the merest song (it
must not be taken that he is such an ardent
admirer of vocalisation that he will part
with his volumes on the performance of an
aria), and discourses unctuously, and in a rich
manner, of "fresh copies" being constantly
supplied.

From Bowler's had been forwarded (gratuitously)
a neat publication, entitled Hints for
the Formation of Book Societies, in which
were set out the strange advantages derivable
form fortuitous concourse of atoms in this
matter of book-clubs. Here, again, in this
instance, it would seem, that the books were
to be presented almost in return for a little
more singing. You might elect to be first-class,
second-class, or third-class, as though
on a railway; but it was note-worthy that
the literary aliment provided in the two last
categories, was of that hard, deal-board,
cushionless character which was to have the
result, as in locomotive institutions, of
driving passengers into the first-class.
Intoxicating banquets were provided for such
privileged mortals. They might gorge and
swell themselves with the new and choicest
works; they might riot, so to speak, in fresh
uncut periodicals, and roll themselves, swine-
like, in a rich mud of reviews. They had but
to ask and to have.

Did not Bowler all but insinuate that these
glorious customers should but fancy the most
recent Coptic pamphlet; he would have a
courier, spurring day and night, to fetch it!
Our Brookrudder society became first-class,
of course. Post-office order remitted and
payable to J. C. Bowler and Company,
Crescent Buildings, E.C., would oblige.

Reverend Alfred Hoblush forwards the
amount enthusiastically; but, out of his own
proper funds—-Dun Lady Diana? Monstrous!

It was a beautiful evening, somewhere
to-wards the close of the first half of the present
century, when the setting sun was pouring down
its departing glories aslant the trees, in a
manner altogether Jacobinical or G. Prince
Regent fashion, when there might have been
observed—it is certain, moreover, that it was
observed—a heavy-laden stagecoach entering
the (market) town of Brookrudder. The
person who might and did observe this
curious phenomenon was a person who, from
his peculiar garb, might have been securely
written down as belonging to the sacerdotal