boys needlessly cutting each other's throats; and much to the disappointment of Wilder, doubtless, who had been my second in the Martingale affair, and enjoyed no better sport, he said, in English, laughing, Vell, make your mint easy, my goot young man, I tink you af got into enough sgrabes about dis tam girl; and dat you and Heerpauk haf no need to blow each other's brains off. » " «Ath for Fitth apologithing, burst out Wilder, that'th out of the quethtion. He gave the challenge, you know; and how the dooth ith he to apologithe now?» « He gave the challenge, and you took it, and you are de ́ greatest fool of de two. I say the two young men shall not fight; and then the honest captain entered into a history of the worthy family which would have saved me at least fifty pounds had I known it sooner. It did not differ in substance from what Rohr and Wilder had both told me in the morning. The venerable Löwe was a great thief and extortioner; the daughters were employed as decoy-ducks, in the first place, for the university and the garrison, and afterwards for young strangers, such as my wise self, who visited the place. There was some very sad story about the elder Miss Löwe and a tutor from St. John's College, Cambridge, who came to Bonn on a reading tour; but I am not at liberty to set down here the particulars. And with regard to Minna, there was a still more dismal history. A fine, handsome young student, the pride of the university, had first ruined himself through the offices of the father, and then shot himself for love of the daughter; from which time the whole town had put the family into Coventry; nor had they appeared for two years in public, until upon the present occasion with me. As for Monsieur Hirsch, he did not care. He was of a rich Frankfort family serving his apprenticeship with Löwe, a cousin, and the destined husband of the younger daughter. He traded as much as he could on his own account, and would run upon any errand, and buy or sell any thing for a consideration. And so, instead of fighting Captain Heerpauk, I agreed will. ingly enough to go back to the hotel at Godesberg, and shake hands with that officer. The reconciliation, or, rather, the acquaintance between us, was effected over a bottle of wine, at Mr. Blinzner's hotel; and we rode comfortably back in a calash together to Bonn, where the friendship was still more closely cemented by a supper. At the close of the repast, Heerpauk made a speech on England, fatherland, and German truth and love, and kindly saluted me with a kiss, which is at any lady's service who peruses this little narrative. As for Mr. Hirsch, it must be confessed, to my shame, that the next morning a gentleman having the air of an old clothesman off duty presented me with an envelope, containing six letters of my composition addressed to Miss Minna Löwe (among them was a little poem in English, which has since called tears from the eyes of more than one lovely girl); and, furthermore, a letter from himself, in which he, Baron Hirsch, of Hirschenwald (the scoundrel, like my friend Wilder, purchased his title in the Awthtwian Thervith »)-in which he, I say, Baron Hirschenwald, challenges me for insulting Miss Minna Löwe, or demanded an apology. " This, I said, Mr. Hirsch might have whenever he chose to come and fetch it, pointing to a horsewhip which lay in a corner; but that he must come early, as I proposed to quit Bonn the next morning. The baron's friend, hearing this, asked whether I would like some remarkably fine cigars for my excursion, which he could give me a great bargain? He was then shown to the door by my body-servant; nor did Hirsch von Hirschenwald come for the apology. Twice every year, however, I get a letter from him, dated Frankfort, and proposing to make me a present of a splendid palace in Austria or Bohemia, or 200,000 florins, should I prefer money. I saw his lady at Frankfort only last year, in a front box at the theatre, loaded with diamonds, and at least sixteen stone in weight. Ah! Minna, Minna! thou mayest grow to be as ugly as sin, and as fat as Daniel Lambert, but I have the amber mouthpiece still, and swear that the prettiest lips in the universe have kissed it! The MS. here concludes with a rude design of a young lady smoking a pipe. CHINA. Narrative of the Expedition to China, from the Commencement of the «CHINA, says a Prophecy of the Nation, is to be conquered by a woman!-and our author, like a loyal and valiant servant militant of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, by an auxiliary prophecy of his own, anticipates this conquest for his Royal Mistress. In that event, our triumphant relation to the representative of the dynasty will, not improbably, give us some influence with his illustrious connexions, the Sun and Moon, and by this means we may chance to recover from the latter, as spoil supplementary, some other of those many visionary projects which, since their disappearance from the earth, the eye of Poetry has discovered in that distant planet. The probabilities of such a result to the arms of our gracious Queen, and such an introduction to the Celestials, we are not called on to discuss. We offer the hint, but for the sake of the hope which we feel it will bring to many pining hearts; for we have, ourselves, a stray or two in that quarter, that we will freely travel all the distance to get back, when Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, shall be proclaimed at Pekin. Enforced idleness, following in the train of promotion, and a sojourn in England, for the cure of a wound received at the storming of the Bogue Forts, in January 1841, drove Commander Bingham upon authorship, and induced him to continue his connexion with the service from which he was separated, by preparing this sketch of the various events connected with the present war in China. We shall confine ourselves, to such extracts from Commander Bingham's pages as may illustrate the manners of the remarkable people with whom we have only now begun to make a real acquaintance, or throw light on the institutions which have, for so many centuries, sealed from our observation nearly a third portion of the globe. The evidences are many, in all the channels through which we hear of this strange people, that the lengthened intercourse to which their commerce has introduced them with the Barbarians," has given them more shrewd measures of the proportions of the latter than popular prejudice or courtly deference will permit them to avow. With a nation so acute -so capable of making estimates, had it not so long wanted standards, this could not well be otherwise; and, therefore, we do not, at all times, give its more enlightened Mandarins credit for all the stupidity they profess. Our author, however, furnishes some curious examples of that profound ignorance, positive and relative, which scarcely becomes a nation so transcendently connected, and, in the individual instances, taken in connexion with other proceedings of the particular parties furnishing them, is open, as we have hinted, to the suspicion of being more politic than real: «About this time there appeared a memorial to the emperor on the opium and sycee question from Keshen, viceroy of Petche-li, by whom we were, about a year and a half afterwards, so completely bamboozled. That he is one of the most acute and wily of Chinese statesmen is, I believe, generally acknowledged; and that he was fully aware how utterly incapable China was of contending against the British power, his subsequent memorials to the Emperor have proved. This memorial affords but a very poor idea of Chinese literature, when we find the most talented of her children writing such absurd nonsense. He falls into the most gross mistakes in his calculations, asserting that in thirty or forty years the use of opium has been the means of several thousand myriad' of taels leaking out to the distant foreigners. Now this is a prodigious error; for at ten millions per year, it would only amount to four hundred millions in forty years. It would appear inconceivable that such a miscalculation could be any other than wilfully made to mislead his celestial master, did we not find this same learned and talented mandarin pencilling in continuation the following most extraordinary nonsense : - Again, in reference to the foreign money which these said foreigners bring, it is all boiled with, and reduced by quicksilver. If you wrap it up; and put it past for several years without touching it, it will become moths and corroding insects, and their silver cups will change into feathers or wings. Their money is all of this species and if we leave it for four or five hundred years, I'm sure I don't know what it will change into at last!' Again, he says, alluding to our demand for tea and rhubarb: The reason of this is, that their climate is rough and rigorous, the sun and wind both fierce and strong; day by day they subsist on beef and mutton; the digestion of this food is not easy; their bowels are bound up, and they speedily die; therefore it is, that every day after meals they take of this divine medicine in order to get a motion of their bowels.'» - On the 21st of June, as our readers know, the first part of the force intended to act against the Chinese arrived off Mecao; and some days afterwards, the Chinese authorities published a graduated scale of rewards, to be given for the taking or destroying British ships or subjects. The document, which the author observes, is curious, as the first of the kind ever known to have emanated from this very singular government, certainly illustrates, in a very marvellous degree, the barbarian policy of these monopolizers of all the wisdom and civilization of the earth. The following is an abstract of the rewards: " «For the capture of a ship of 80 guns, twenty thousand dollars; for smaller ones, a diminished reward of one hundred dollars for every gun under 80. For utterly destroying the same by fire or otherwise, ten thousand dollars. For a merchant-vessel, all her cargo-whether goods or money, excepting guns, warlike instru ments, or opium-to the captors, with an additional ten thousand |