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soul! little thought he had invested his daughter in a manner to bring him in such compound interest in the way of grand-daughters and grandsons. The business went to wrack. The oily-headed foreman set himself up at the corner of a court opposite to the house of his master, and made in his small window and at his door a display of articles painfully like those which had so long dangled at the door or rested in the shop of his master: and that master, stunned by the sudden and frightful blow upon a mind which had risen upon the elastic spring of hope to receive it half way, of course with double weight and severity, became a forlorn, weak, placid creature, that felt nothing about his children, sorrowed nothing about his wife, but wandered around the house of his father-in-law, accompanied by the most watchful of shabbily dressed men,-a careful introduction on the part of Dr. Warburton.

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Harmless at length the unhappy man was found,
The spirit settled, but the reason drown'd;
And all the dreadful tempest died away
To the dull stillness of the misty day!"

For weeks and weeks did this misty day remain upon the mind of the unfortunate Klünchünbrüch; and there were of course not wanting friends to issue that circular, called a secret, respecting the clouded state of his mind and the dilapidated condition of his fortunes. If he had been confused in his intellect, and yet at the same time prosperous in his finances, he would have been, as we invariably find it in this blessed world, the fittest of all men to perform the duties of the situation to which he had originally been appointed. But he was a dependent now upon the bounty and pity of relatives; and as the only relief to those relatives was derived from the small salary attendant upon his secretaryship to the West London Female Reforming Orphan Penitentiary, it was a natural consequence that he was pronounced by most of his acquaintance and friends to be totally inadequate for further employ, and an active canvass took place for the next vacancy,-every letter deeply lamenting the cause which occasioned such vacancy, and with a sincerity (cut out of the same piece of cloth) pledging to the most unremitting and earnest exertions in the cause of the inestimable charity, to the secretaryship of which the appointment was respectfully, humbly, but confidently entreated. Then followed "grateful servants," and "obedient servants," and "having the honors to be," and " very respectful and most humble servants," and in fact all the burlesque and farcery of servantry which invariably bring up the masquerade conclusion of a letter.

The canvass, as I have stated, went on actively for some time,-at first, like the progress of insidious fire, in a smothered state; but at length the flames broke out without disguise, and it appeared quite certain that nothing could save the ruin. The governors had each his favorite candidate. Five of these candidates were, by a select precious private committee, to be chosen out of the sixty-eight for the great contest. Gubby's testimonials were considered undeniable; but

Bingley was backed by a bishop and two rectors, and was set down as a dangerous man. Roberts, a very respectable grocer, relied upon the strength of his mixed tea, his serious habits, and the eloquence of his circular, which had been written by the Rev. Mr. Sion, of Ebenezer Chapel, and which circular was pronounced by several old ladies of the congregation to be forcible about female virtue. All, in fact, were looking forward to the election, and the half-yearly general meeting was gradually approaching. Poor Klünchünbrüch must therefore soon submit to that immutable destiny which would send him into the sad privacy of a withered life, to be a burden to those who should have been the happiest burthen to him, and to look to relations-in-law for those common charities which Lear has so pathetically described in three words, "raiment, bed, and food!"

Poor Klünchünbrüch!—said I so ?-not so poor! As the day of his duties approached, reason appeared to approach with it,-faintly, and like a shadow, it must be confessed. The first symptoms of the dawning of his sense of the day was a simple restlessness after books and papers. His wife, too, for whom he had hitherto shown no sympathy, and yet who watched him with a tenderness of which only trouble had shown her to be capable, seemed, by her attentions or her voice, occasionally to vibrate upon his memory.

"Kindly she chides his boyish flights, while he
Will for a moment fixed and pensive be;
And, as she trembling speaks, his lively eyes
Explore her looks; he listens to her sighs.
Charm'd by her voice, th' harmonious sounds invade
His clouded mind, and for a time persuade :
Like the pleas'd infant, who has newly caught
From the maternal glance a gleam of thought,
He stands enrapt, the half-known voice to hear;
And starts, half conscious, at the falling tear!"

Again and again he spoke of books; he called his wife by her Christian name; he patted the heads of his children; he was curious as to the person who was so continually in his society; he became anxious about the 5th of July (the day!); and he at length was uneasy until he had his proper books and documents before him relative to the charity; and when they were before him, he sat down to them with the same remarkable interest and solemnity which we have before noticed; cast up, corrected, and proved the accounts with precisely his original serious zeal; seemed to advance, as it were, into the daylight of the mind; prepared everything for what he called the board; and, bating the pickle-shop and all its duties, and the Funds and all its distractions, he seemed to be again the great secretary, and in “his habit as he lived." The family around him wondered at, but encouraged, this returning of a mind which had hitherto apparently been so utterly unstrung. They, from pure heart, longed to encourage a reaction of the intellect.

The great half-yearly day of the West London Female Reforming Orphan Penitentiary at length arrived. The five fortunate holders of the lucky chances, having made considerable outlay in cards and letters, were in attendance in an ante-room. A large round deal table in the board-room, covered with very coarse green baize, furnished with twelve clean pieces of very red blotting-paper, twelve sheets of foolscap, twelve extremely new pens, and six leaden inkstands placed

above the centre between each two of the pieces of blotting-paper, &c. had several very protruding waistcoats thrust against its edge, and several waistcoats not of the corporation were placed at certain varied distances from the edge; and, in fact, mixing new pens, foolscap, powdered heads, leaden inkstands, variously-filled waistcoats, and blottingpaper into one mass, you have before you the committee of the West London Female Reforming Orphan Penitentiary.

Just before the chairman, the Rev. Dr. Plumpington, the rosy, wellpowdered rector of had taken his seat, a little plethoric, but very serious, he stood conversing with members of the committee previously to its opening, when the meeting was struck with "most admired disorder" by the calm but business-like entry of a sedate apparition, in the form of Mr. Klünchünbrüch, with books and documents under his arm and in his hand, dressed as neatly as upon the important occasion of every former day, his eye placid and expressive of a sense of duty, his manner composedly affable, yet formally respectful: he bowed from governor to governor,-certainly, a thought lower to the chairman; arranged his books and papers at his appointed place as secretary, and prepared for the proceedings of the audit with a serenity so akin to that of the previous half-yearly day of meeting, that his intermediate apathy seemed to be all inventive calumny; and the governors felt that all the secretary, and all the accountant, and all the man of business, reduced to their usual half-yearly essence, was now before them!

The Rev. Dr. Plumpington took his seat amidst a vast deal of recovering coughing among his circular eleven. There was a buzz, a good deal of fat-whispering between double-chins, nods, silent admissions, palms pressed against palms, and elevation of eyebrows, when Mr. Klünchünbrüch, with a quiet manner that was perfectly irresistible, laid the minutes of the last meeting before the Rev. Chairman. What was to be done? The proceedings proceeded incontrollably; the secretary read the necessary accounts, vouched them, took the proper minutes for the next half-yearly meeting, silenced every report that had been prejudicial to his favor without a breath of explanation, and was congratulated upon his good looks and the correctness with which he kept the charity accounts. The election was never touched upon in the presence of the secretary, or openly at the board; and the five stewed-down candidates went home in a more bewildered state even than the secretary, carrying with them several large bundles of cards and circulars, which could now but serve as playthings for the children and squills for the wives.

Home in a coach, with all his books and documents, (unattended,) went Mr. Secretary Klunchünbrüch. His guardian man watched him, himself unwatched! The astounding sanity of this day almost made his family insane. Alas! his return after this strange, yet to him accustomed attention to business, was a return to a severer apathy. The mind, overstrung to an unnatural tension, had not a string that was not relaxed and loosened. He took to his bed; his childishness, his estrangement, his insanity returned upon him in a deeper mistiness for months. "Oh! what an accountant's mind wa here o'erthrown!"

The terrible results of this exertion of a day were colored, circulated, exaggerated by the "friends, countrymen, and lovers" of the whole district. But although it was confidently believed that on the

subsequent, and indeed on many subsequent occasions, the election must of sheer and bitter necessity occur,-the day of election had not yet arrived! Klünchünbrüch has, with a mind like a half-yearly aloe, invariably bloomed, expanded into action on the essential day, gone steadily through his duties, and sunk into an increased state of prostration the moment the day was over!

Poor poor Klünchünbruch!-thine has been a hard fate!—to be considered to have but two days of sanity in the year, and by those who assume to have three hundred and sixty-five such days, and have none!-to have a sense of duty in thee high enough to rise over wrecked fortune and happiness, and yet to enjoy but two days in the twelve months worthy of thy true and laboring spirit! Thou livest still-(for in the main incidents this sketch is founded on reality,)— and so long as thy accounts are not called from thee on earth, I verily believe there is a vitality in thy sense of this world's duty that will protract a call to thy more solemn and final audit.

J. H. R.

THE TWO SISTERS.

No wonder that the great lyric poet should have given the epithet of "molesta" to "pituita," or that the Romans erected temples to the goddess Tussis. Both prove that the famed clime of Italy was not proof, even in ancient times, against the most deadly of maladies.

There is an importunate guest, who comes unbidden; first knocks. gently at the door, then with more assurance, after a time will admit of no denial, and at last makes the house her home. Shall I draw her portrait? It is not a prepossessing one. She is a "death in life," an age in youth; her face is "white as leprosy;" her eyes are lustrous and glassy; her breath, of fire; her step inaudible, yet sure.

She delights in the keen blasts of the wintry wind, the bleak and unsheltered mountain, a wide extent of coast open to all the fury of the northeast, the autumnal woods with their fallen and decayed leaves, the stagnant and weed-overgrown pool, the putrid waste of tremulous marshes; these are some of her haunts!

Yet does she not disdain the resort of man. Go to the gas-lit theatre, linger in the draught of its corridors; enter the crowded and unventilated ball room; kneel in the vaulted aisle of some church, steaming putrefaction: she is there, in her multiplicity of form, and ubiquity of evil.

Yes! in all and each of these places she is to be found.

Oh! the vulture that she is. To use the words of the Greek dramatist, "The scent of human prey sends up a grateful odor to make glad her nostrils, as laughter does the heart;" and, like the bloodhounds of Orestes, she never loses sight of her prey till she has tracked it to earth.

She is no respecter of persons, has no predilection for dresses: sometimes she clothes herself in the robe of pride and sometimes

is seen in rags. She pretends to be the most affectionate of brides; tells her lover" Be happy!" winds him in her chilly arms, and, writhe as he may, he cannot escape from her hellish embraces.

You shall be acquainted presently with her name: may you only hear it! Be strangers to each other, but avoid her as you would a pestilence!

I will let you into the secret of those Listen!

whom she loves best.

If there is a father who has an only son, the last scion of his stock, the staff of his declining years, his idol, the object of his worship, one on whom he gazes till he sheds tears of tenderest delight, a youth "the observed of all observers," who has ennobled his mind, cultivated his talents, and purified his affections, it is on him she casts her longing eye, she breathes on him with her breath of flame. The artist at his easel, the student in his closet, the author in his garret, the manufacturer at his loom,-these are the objects of her fond regard. But for the bloated epicure, the half-starved miser, the griping usurer, the painted harridan-these, with a singular caprice, she passes by unobserved; whilst from youth and beauty-youth, ere it comes to its prime; not as it displays itself in the muscular vigor of limb, the roseate bloom on the unchanging cheek, or elastic vigor of the step; no! no!-like an unseasonable frost, she chooses to cut off the fairest flowers, and nip the tenderest shoots.

She is called Consumption. Yet comes she not alone. Disease, Desolation, and Despair, these are her familiars, she brings them with her in her imperial train: they thrust themselves into the chariot, they accompany her to the public gardens, they intrude on the secluded walk, they seat themselves at the table, drug the wine with gall, mix poison in the viands, haunt the couch of restlessness, and quit not their victims till the cup of bitterness is full,-till they have found a refuge from pain, sorrow, and regret, in that last resting-place of the wretched, the grave.

Such were my reflections as in March, many, many years ago, I was lounging leisurely in the "Invalid's Walk" at Torbay. It is the Nice or Pisa of England, and the great refuge of consumptive patients from all parts of the three kingdoms. This famed spot is protected from the north-easterly winds by range behind range of hills: here, carpeted with turf of eternal verdure; and there, surmounted by tors covered with plantations to their tops, or showing, denuded of the slightest vestige of vegetation, their bald scalps, of the most fantastic forms, and rich in color as those of the lakes of Cumberland or Killarney. So that Torbay is not only the most picturesque, but the most desirable residence on the coast of Devonshire. But if the environs are beautiful, what shall I say of the place itself, with its basin, like a small sea-port scooped out of the rock, artificially formed by means of two piers or moles, the miniature of those at Genoa; terrace above terrace, its buildings and villas of the most elegant construction, with their verandas and balconies commanding a view of Torbay, seen from between two rival wooded cones, where many a thatched cottage peeps, like a bird's nest out of the thick foliage of evergreens that embower them? I have called Torbay a winter residence; no! winter there is none: so mild is the climate, that the ilex, the arbutus, and the

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