flourishes, this very Desirable Investment deviated in its features even more than usual from its portrait in the prospectus.

The Villa turned out to be little better than an ornamented Barn, and the Promised Land was some of the worst land in England, and overflowed occasionally by the neighbouring river. An Optimist could hardly have discovered a single merit on the estate; but he did; for whilst I was gazing in blank disappointment at the uncultivated nature before me, not even studded with rooks, I heard his familiar voice at my elbow

"Rather a small property, Sir-but amply secured by ten solid miles of Terra Firma from the encroachments of the German Ocean."

PERE LA CHAISE.

"And if the sea could," I retorted, "it seems to me very doubtful, whether it would care to enter on the premises."

"Perhaps not as a matter of marine taste," said the Optimist. "Perhaps not, Sir. And yet, in my pensive moments, I have fancied that a place like this with a sombre interest about it, would be a desirable sort of Wilderness, and more in unison

with an Il Penseroso cast of feelings than the laughing beauties of a Villa in the Regent's Park, the Cynosure of Fashion and Gaiety, enlivened by an infinity of equipages. But excuse me, Sir, I perceive that I am wanted elsewhere," and the florid gentleman went off at a trot towards a little man in black, who was beckoning to him from the door of the Swiss Villa.

"Yes," was my reflection as he turned away from me, "if he can find in such a swamp as this a Fancy Wilderness, a sort of Shenstonian Solitude for a sentimental fit to evaporate in, he must certainly be the Happiest Man in England."

As to his pensive moments, the mere idea of them sufficed to set my risible muscles in a quiver. But as if to prove how he would have comported himself in the Slough of Despond, during a subsequent ramble of exploration round the estate, he actually plumped up to his middle in a bog;-an accident which only drew from him the remark that the place afforded "a capital opportunity for a spirited proprietor to establish a Splendid Mud Bath, like the ones so much in vogue at the German Spas!"

"If that gentleman takes a fancy to the place," I remarked to the who was showing me round the property, "he will person be a determined bidder."

"Him bid!" exclaimed the man, with an accent of the utmost astonishment-" Him bid!-why he's the Auctioneer that's to sell us! I thought you would have remarked that in his speech, for he imitates in his talk the advertisements of the famous Mr. Robins. He's called the Old Gentleman."

"Old! why he appears to be in the prime of life."

"Yes, Sir,-but it's the other Old Gentleman-"

"What! the Devil?"

Yes, Sir,-because you see, he's always a-knocking down of somebody's little Paradise."

SPRING.

A NEW VERSION.

"Ham. The air bites shrewdly-it is very cold.
Hor. It is a nipping and an eager air."-Hamlet.

"COME, gentle Spring! ethereal mildness come !"
Oh! Thomson, void of rhyme as well as reason,
How couldst thou thus poor human nature hum?
There's no such season.

The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name!
For why, I find her breath a bitter blighter!
And suffer from her blows as if they came
From Spring the Fighter.

Her praises, then, let hardy poets sing,

And be her tuneful laureates and upholders, Who do not feel as if they had a Spring Pour'd down their shoulders!

Let others eulogise her floral shows,

From me they cannot win a single stanza, I know her blooms are in full blow-and so's The Influenza.

Her cowslips, stocks, and lilies of the vale,
Her honey-blossoms that you hear the bees at,
Her pansies, daffodils, and primrose pale,
Are things I sneeze at!

Fair is the vernal quarter of the year!

And fair its early buddings and its blowingsBut just suppose Consumption's seeds appear With other sowings!

For me, I find, when eastern winds are high,
A frigid, not a genial inspiration;
Nor can, like Iron-Chested Chubb, defy
An inflammation.

Smitten by breezes from the land of plague,
To me all vernal luxuries are fables,
Oh! where's the Spring in a rheumatic leg,
Stiff as a table's ?

I limp in agony,-I wheeze and cough;
And quake with Ague, that Great Agitator;
Nor dream, before July, of leaving off

My respirator.

What wonder if in May itself I lack

A peg for laudatory verse to harg on ?—
Spring mild and gentle !—yes, as Spring-heeled Jack
To those he sprang on.

In short, whatever panegyrics lie

In fulsome odes too many to be cited,
The tenderness of Spring is all my eye,
And that is blighted!

THE LONGEST HOUR IN MY LIFE.

AN EXTRAVAGANZA.

CHAPTER 1.

"TIME," says Rosalind, in that delicious sylvan comedy called "As You Like It," "Time travels in divers paces with divers persons."

And thence she prettily and wittily proceeds to enumerate the parties with whom he gallops, trots, ambles, or comes to a stand-still. And nothing can be truer than her theory.

Old Chronos has indeed infinite rates of performancefrom railway to snail-way. As the butcher's boy said of his horse, "He can go all sorts of paces-as fast as you like, or as slow as you don't."