felling, and the head-forester condemned us with critical eye. If the trunk indeed be mercifully left standing-half in pride, half in pity-to show what was once the glory of the green wood, the strong limbs have been one by one lopped off and carted away. To-morrow they will lay the axe to

the root of the tree, and, the pettiest ramifications grubbed up, the turf will grow where once the brave oak stood. Be kind to us, O ye acorns that have taken root, and are rearing yourselves around! But while the gnarled

trunk remains, and is animate and can talk, it can feel its pleasures can discourse on the lovers' vows it has heard exchanged beneath its spreading branches; the furtive kisses snatched while each rustle of the leaves brought a blush to the maid's cheeks, and made even the man start and look round; the charming quarrels, the more charming reconciliations, the sighs and tears, the smiles and silver laughter that mingled as the water-drops mingle with the pebbles in the mountain streamlet. But the ruins are inanimate, my dear, and the oaks cannot talk in the grove or the wild flowers on the mountain crag. In that indefinable yearning for communion with alien things, to know the speech of the birds, to fathom the mystery of the beasts, to interpret the voice of the waves-nay, to penetrate that which the wind says in the stormy night, and to disclose of what import is the muttering of the stones beneath the tread of feet and the pressure of wheels; in that persistent craving to Know More which possesses all humanity, and makes it hopeful even while it renders it uneasy and dissatisfied, it would be an inestimable boon if we could become acquainted with the -things that have occurred on that coveted spot of ground, or round about that mass of crumbling masonry. But the dust is silent, my child, and the stones must be for ever dumb.

Many years ago, toiling up the worn steps of a turret of

Netley Abbey, and gazing from the summit-now at the blue Southampton Water, dotted by white sails-now at the sward beneath, cumbered with the grey ruin of the Abbey as with the tombstones of dead ages-I thought, "Could but those stones speak!" How many prayers, swelling in solemn Gregorian chant, buoyed up by the pealing organ, have floated through that great window's tracery! There was the kitchen! See the black, charred, sooty wreck of the chimney. In that shattered refectory, by that chimney side, Henry's ruthless commissioners may have sate on their work of spoliation. Never more shall the grave Abbey resound to the tread of the sandalled monks. Never more shall the flames leap up that blackened chimney. Stands there a fragment of wall, anywhere in Netley, I wonder, within whose thickness a craven monk false to his vows was built up centuries ago? Fancy the half sportive, half scientific hammer of a geologist, seeking to discover what influences of petrifaction ages have had on the stern-ribbed mortar, loosening a stone-the stone loosening others, the fatal. Cavity standing discovered; and, crouching, skull to kneebones, thumbs and grisly fingers still intertwined as in his last agony the dreadful Skeleton. By his side is the earthen pitcher, intact, defying Time, as earthen pots can only do; but the water it once held long since dried up-unless, indeed, with the scant morsel of bread, he swallowed both greedily in the first day of captivity. He had gnawed, perhaps in despairing hunger, the cord that bound his waist. Fibres of hemp yet adhere to the fleshless jaws. Christ's cross and the beads of his scapulary-the thread that held them rotted-lie in a little heap at his feet. Tatters of monastic clothing drop off when the bones are moved, and with the finger you may brush away the ring of soft, brown, dead hair that encircles his tonsured skull. Yes; this must have been

a monk ;—and, ah! forgive a poor old woman's day dream. It is so many years since I clomb the worn stairs, and looked on the grey ruin and the blue estuary. But then I wished

the crumbling stones to tell me tales of days gone by, and wondered if those wrecks were sentient, and felt pleasure to hear the footsteps and laughing prattle of the lads and lasses who had come to Netley for a gay picnic-which brings me by the most natural transition in the world to the great subject of bonnets, and to the infinitely greater subject of CRINOLINE.

Louisa, I am sixty; and I was just your age when I happened to be staying on a visit to Captain Boomer of the Royal Navy, who had something to do with Portsmouth Dockyard— victualling people, I think. Our good host and hostess brought a party of us girls, with a middy or two, a captain out of the garrison, two raw ensigns from the Hampshire Militia, and a French officer-Colonel de la Blaguetonnière, who had lived a long time at Winchester on parole, and at the Peace did not care to go back to his own country-over from Portsmouth for a day's picnicking at Netley Abbey. Yes; it was the autumn of the year 1817. We came over to Southampton in the Port Admiral's yacht, the sweetest little cutter that ever was seen. There were the Misses Hardy-the rich retired purser's daughters from Southsea, bold, forward, handsome girls, whose papa used to horsewhip them, and always gave them to understand that they were to have twenty thousand pounds apiece to their fortunes when they married; only he died just before Jess Hardy had ordered Captain Jolly of the Marines to marry her; and then it was discovered that poor dear Mr. Hardy was dreadfully in debt to the Government, who seized everything; and the girls had to go out governessing, and died, every one of them, the crossest of old maids. There was handsome Mrs. Lintot, with her hat

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and feathers, and her amber satin pelisse. She came, herself, of a high family, but had married Mr. Lintot, the colonial merchant-wholesale grocer, they used to call it then-of Milk Street, Cheapside. She was supposed to be hopelessly in love with the Prince Regent, to whom she had been introduced by Sir William Curtis at a Mansion House ball, during the visit of the Allied Sovereigns in '14; but on his Royal Highness neglecting to notice her one day, in 1816, when he was driving a curricle on the Cliff at Brighton, she went quite over to the other side, and afterwards, in 1821, was one of the ladies of England who went up with an Address to Queen Caroline of Brunswick, at Brandenburgh House, Hammer

· smith. Mr. Lintot died of the commercial crisis of 1825, and Mrs. Lintot re-married-who would have thought it? though I always had my suspicions-Captain Jolly of the Marines. He went out to Jamaica, where he had some negroes and sugar canes, and died of the yellow fever; and his widow having sold her plantation and slaves at a great price, became a fervent abolitionist, corresponded with Mr. Brougham and Mr. Zachary Macaulay-the father of the historian of England-and married, for the third time, the Reverend Silas Bumpus, the Methodist Missionary who was so nearly hanged for fomenting an insurrection among the misguided blacks(who were a great deal better treated, my dear, in their worst times, than many labourers and domestic servants in England, and did not get a bit more beating than was good for them) -and who afterwards went out to India and immortalised his name in connection with Suttee and the Temple of Juggernaut. Mrs. Lintot wrote a book while in India, called

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Chutnee, Curry and Thuggee," and died only last year at this very Pumpwell. She had buried her husband many years before at Cowadapore, and in her last moments made a dead set at the hand of Admiral Shroudesley Shovel. There