In Scotland all sorts of superstitions are
rife, fairies or good people and bogies, or
boggles, among the most general; while
Ireland is the very cradle of moonshine and
poetic falsifications, from the legend which
makes Saint Patrick the great vermin hunter
of the kingdom, to that which bans Saint
Kevin's soul for Kathleen's eyes of most
unholy blue. To prolong the idea into satire
would be to write an article of illimitable
length; for there is scarcely one among us
who has not his own private bit of insane
superstition, certainly not one who has not
his own private bit of insane eccentricity;
and the national peculiarities—from mammon
worship down to crinoline—are prominent
enough for the dullest marksman to hit.
Fancy a rational people consenting to wear
chimney-pots on their heads, and steel hoops
round their bodies; fancy stays being considered
more sacred than lives, and consumption
and disease as nothing compared to the
divinity lying in a deformed waist; fancy
soldiers sent to serve in India with stocks
and bear-skins, crimson cloth and skin-tight
coats; fancy dead bodies left unburied,
because two officials quarrel, and the duties
of a parish are not accurately defined by Act
of Parliament; fancy a prison full of rogues
better treated, fed, and lodged, than a workhouse
full of honest men, who have worked
the flesh off their bones, or who can get
nothing to do for their daily bread; fancy the
rage for cheapness blossoming out into all kinds
of adulterated abominations, and no stop put,
because of a political theory: fancy all these
things, and many more of the same nature,
and then say whether Chinaman or Hindu
submits to more absurdities than the Englishman
of the nineteenth century does, and
whether the Book of Rites of the one, and the
Institutes of Menu of the other, are less
tyranical than custom is with us, or that
terrible old fairy godmother, the immortal
Mrs. Grundy!

   THE GREAT DUNKERQUE FAILURE.

I SUPPOSE that nothing could exceed the
astonishment of the whole population of
Smallport, including both natives and visitors,
when it came to be pretty generally known
that my half-brother, James Chowler, and
our dear and mutual friend Purkis had taken
it into their heads to undertake a voyage to
Dunkerque and back in a lugger. Here was
a thing to do! If they wanted to go abroad,
there was the steam-packet. Why couldn't
they go in that as other people did? If, on
the other hand, they wanted a sail, why not
join one of the many excursion parties to the
neighbouring town of Bluffybeach? Or if they
must be alone, forsooth, why not take a two-
hours' sail in a pleasure boat—there was the
Fairy, ten feet long by five in the beam—
what did they want better than that? Pleasure
boat, indeed, to them, who had known
better days, and what it was to cruise about
that very coast in a schooner yacht—that
lovely little jade, the Brunette, with her
rakish masts and bowsprit pointed down till
it almost touched the surf. Pleasure boat,
indeed!

Any men less bent upon their project than
my half-brother and that old sea-dog who
was to be his companion, would have been
discouraged and daunted from their purpose
four times over when first beginning to move
in the affair, by the obstacles and difficulties
that came in their way. They had made up
their minds, however, for the cruise, and I
must own I don't wonder at it. Gladly,
most gladly, would I have joined them
but for one infirmity, which unfortunately
quite unfits me for all marine purposes—
I am a bad sailor, and yet by a strange
and ironical combination of qualities an
ardent lover of the sea, of ships, and all
things maritime. 'Tis a hard case, but so if
is; consequently, the only share I could
have in the cruise was connected with the
preparations and negotiations which had to
be carried on, on shore, before the start could
be effected, and numerous, intricate, and
perplexing enough these negotiations were,
as the reader shall see.

In the first place, it was deemed advisable
to secure our friend Balchild to make a third
in the expedition; and he, being a solicitor in
large practice, could not choose his time, but
was detained in town longer than had been
anticipated, by a great will case in which it
was his desperate object to contend that the
deceased party, who was distinctly proved to
have spent fifteen thousand pounds on works
of art by the old masters, was yet at the time
of his doing so of sound mind and in the full
possession of his faculties, A case so
outrageously hopeless as this necessarily
involved long and repeated delays and one
change of the appointed day for starting; but
at length, the cause having been brought
before a jury, and the counsel for the insane
view of the case, who, by the bye, must have
been a very knowing fellow indeed, having
had one of the pictures, a landscape by Polemberg,
of a dark and gloomy tone, brought into
court, and having put it to the jury whether
any person of sound mind would part with
seven hundred and fifty sovereigns (which
was the price of the work)—"bright golden
sovereigns, gentlemen of the jury, for that"
—the counsel for the side against our friend
having acted in this astute and convincing
manner, and having, it is needless to say,
gained his verdict, our solicitor was able to
leave London at last, and devote himself to
the promised cruise.

Immediately upon the arrival of our legal
friend, there commenced a series of harassing
disputes and bargainings with the long-shore
sailors, as to the moneys for which they would
covenant to undertake the voyage. At length
the part proprietor of one of the largest