T happened, the other evening, that, intending to call at

L Street, I arrived a few minutes before Hyson; when W***, seated beside the Urn, his eyes shaded by his hand, was catechising his learned prodigy, the Master Hopeful, as if for a tea-table degree. It was a whimsical

contrast, between the fretful, pouting visage of the urchin, having his gums rubbed so painfully, to bring forward his wisdom-tooth-and the parental visage, sage, solemn, and satisfied, and appealing ever and anon, by a dramatic sidelook, to the circle of smirking auditors.

W*** was fond of this kind of display, eternally stirring up the child for exhibition with his troublesome long pole,— besides lecturing him through the diurnal vacations so tediously, that the poor urchin was fain,-for the sake of a little play, to get into school again.

I hate all forcing-frames for the young intellect, and the Locke system, which after all is but a Canal system for raising the babe-mind to unnatural levels. I pity the poor child that is learned in alpha beta, but ignorant of top and taw; and was never so maliciously gratified as when, in spite of all his promptings and leading questions, I beheld W *** reddening, even to the conscious tips of his tingling ears, at the boy's untimely inaptitude. Why could he not rest con tented, when the poor imp had answered him already, "What was a Roman Emperor ?"-without requiring an interpretation of the Logos?

"As it fell upon a day."

T

"AS IT FELL UPON A DAY."

WONDER that W, the Ami des Enfans, has

never written a sonnet, or ballad, on a girl that had broken her pitcher. There are in the subject the poignant heart's anguish for sympathy and description;-and the brittleness of jars and joys, with the abrupt loss of the watery

fruits (the pumpkins as it were) of her labours, for a moral. In such childish accidents there is a world of woe ;--the fall of earthenware is to babes, as, to elder contemplations, the Fall of Man.

I have often been tempted myself to indite a didactic ode to that urchin in Hogarth with the ruined pie-dish. What a lusty anguish is wringing him-so that all for pity he could die; and then there is the instantaneous falling on of the Beggar Girl to lick up the fragments-expressively hinting how universally want and hunger are abounding in this miserable world, and ready gaping at every turn, for such windfalls and stray Godsends. But, hark!-what a shrill, feline cry startleth the wide Aldgate!

Oh! what's befallen Bessy Brown,

She stands so squalling in the street;
She's let her pitcher tumble down,

And all the water 's at her feet!

The little schoolboys stood about,

And laugh'd to see her pumping, pumping ;
Now with a curtsey to the spout,

And then upon her tiptoes jumping.

Long time she waited for her neighbours.

To have their turns-but she must lose
The watery wages of her labours,-

Except a little in her shoes!

E

Without a voice to tell her tale,
And ugly transport in her face;
All like a jugless nightingale,

She thinks of her bereaved case.

At last she sobs-she cries-she screams!And pours her flood of sorrows out, From eyes and mouth, in mingled streams, Just like the lion on the spout.

For well poor Bessy knows her mother Must lose her tea, for water's lack, That Sukey burns-and baby-brother Must be dry-rubb'd with huck-a-back!