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couch, watching all his wants, and studying all his looks, trying, but in vain, to discover some amendment. Oh for those days!' I now thought, when a calm at sea appeared an intolerable evil, only because it stopped some tide of folly or delayed some scheme of vice!'

At last one afternoon, when, totally exhausted with want of sleep, I sat down by my child in all the composure of torpid despair, the sailors rushed in one and all-for even they had felt my agony, and doted on my boy. They came to cheer me with better tidings. A breeze had just sprung up! The waves had again begun to ripple, and the lazy keel to stir. As minute pressed on minute, the motion of the ship became swifter; and presently, as if nothing had been wanting but a first impulse, we again dashed through the waves with all our former speed.

Every hour now brought us visibly nearer the inmost recess of the deep Adriatic and the end of our journey. Pola seemed to glide by like a vision: presently we passed Fiume: we saw Capo d'Istria but a few minutes: at last we descried Trieste itself! Another half hour, and every separate house became visible, and not long after we ran full sail into the harbour. The sails were taken in, the anchor was dropped, and a boat instantly came alongside.

All the necessary preparations had been made for immediately conveying my patient on shore. Wrapped up in a shawl, he was lifted out of his crib, laid on a pillow, and lowered into the boat, where I held him in my lap, protected to the best of my power from the roughness of the blast and the dashing of the spray until we reached the quay.

In my distress I had totally forgotten the taint contracted at Melada, and had purposed, the instant we stepped on shore, to carry my child straight to a physician. New anguish pierced my soul when two bayonets crossed upon my breast forced me, in spite of my alternate supplication and rage, to remain on the jettee, there to wait his coming, and his previous scrutiny of all our healthy crew. All I could obtain as a special favour was a messenger to hurry his approach, while, panting for his arrival, I sat down with my Alexis in my arms under a low shed which kept off a pelting shower. I scarce know how long this situation lasted. My mind was so wrapped up in the danger of my boy as to remain wholly unconscious of the bustle around, except when the removal of some cask or barrel forced me to shift my station. Yet, while wholly deaf to the unceasing din of the place, I could discern the faintest rumour that seemed to announce the approaching physician. O, how I cursed his unfeeling delay! how I would have paved his way with gold to have hastened his coming! and yet a something whispered continually in my ear that the utmost speed of man no longer could avail.

Ah! that at least, confirmed in this sad persuasion, I might have tasted the heart-rending pleasure of bestowing upon my departing child the last earthly endearments! but, tranquil, composed, and softly slumbering as he looked, I feared to disturb a repose on which I founded my only remaining hopes. All at once, in the midst of my despair, I saw a sort of smile light up my darling's features, and hard as I strove to guard against all vain illusions, I could not at this sight stop a ray of gladness from gliding unchecked into my trembling heart. Short, however, was the joy soon vanished the deceitful symptom! On a closer view it only appeared to have been a slight convulsion which had hurried over my child's now tranquil countenance, as will sometimes dart over the smooth mirror of a dormant lake the image of a bird in the air. It looked like the response of a departing angel, to those already on high, that hailed his speedy coming. The soul of my Alexis was fast preparing for its flight.

Lest he might feel ill at ease in my lap, I laid him down upon my cloak, and kneeled by his side to watch the growing change in his features. The present now was all to me: the future I knew I no longer should reck. Feeling my breath close to his cheek, he half opened his eyes, looked as if after a long absence again suddenly recognising his father, andputting out his little mouth-seemed to crave one last token of love. The temptation was too powerful: I gently pressed my lip upon that of my babe, and gathered from it the proffered kiss. Life's last faint spark was just going forth, and I caught it on the threshold. Scarce had I drawn back my face, when all respiration ceased. His eye-strings broke, his features fell, and his limbs stiffened for ever. All was over: Alexis was no more.

WASHINGTON IRVING.

MR WASHINGTON IRVING, a native of America, commenced a career of literary exertion in this country by the publication in 1820 of The Sketch

Washington Irving.

Book, a series of short tales and essays, sentimental and humorous, which were originally printed in an American periodical, but illustrative of English manners and scenery. Mr Irving had previously published in his native country a humorous History of New York, by Knickerbocker, being an imaginary account of the original Dutch inhabitants of that state; and he had also issued a satirical periodical entitled Salmagundi. The Sketch-Book' was received with great favour in Britain; its carefully elaborated style and beauties of diction were highly praised, and its portraitures of English rural life and customs, though too antiquated to be strictly accurate, were pleasing and interesting. It was obvious that the author had formed his taste upon that of Addison and Goldsmith; but his own great country, its early state of society, the red Indians, and native traditions, had also supplied him with a fund of natural and original description. His stories of Rip Van Winkle and the Sleepy Hollow are perhaps the finest pieces of original fictitious writing that this century has produced, next to the works of Scott. In 1822 Mr Irving continued the same style of fanciful English delineation in his Bracebridge Hall, in which we are introduced to the interior of a squire's mansion, and to a number of original

issued from his fertile pen-Astoria, a narrative of American adventure; A Tour in the Prairies; Abbotsford and Newstead, &c. The principal works of Mr Irving are his Sketch-Book' and Bracebridge Hall; these are the corner-stones of his fame, and likely to be durable. In all his writings, however, there are passages evincing fine taste, gentle affections, and graceful description. His sentiments are manly and generous, and his pathetic and humorous sketches are in general prevented from degenerating into extravagance by practical good sense and a correct judgment. Modern authors have too much neglected the mere matter of style; but the success of Mr Irving should convince the careless that the graces of composition, when employed even on paintings of domestic life and the quiet scenes of nature, can still charm as in the days of Addison, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie.

[Manners in New York in the Dutch Times.] The houses of the higher class were generally constructed of wood, excepting the gable end, which was of small black and yellow Dutch bricks, and always faced on the street; as our ancestors, like their descendants, were very much given to outward show, and were noted for putting the best leg foremost. The house was always furnished with abundance of large doors and small windows on every floor; the date of its erection was curiously designated by iron figures on the front; and on the top of the roof was perched a fierce little weathercock, to let the family into the important secret which way the wind blew. These, like the weathercocks on the tops of our steeples, pointed so many different ways, that every man could have a wind to his mind; and you would have thought old Eolus had set all his bags of wind adrift, pellmell, to gambol about this windy metropolis; the most stanch and loyal citizens, however, always went according to the weathercock on the top of the governor's house, which was certainly the most correct, as he had a trusty servant employed every morning to climb up and point it whichever way the wind blew.

In those good days of simplicity and sunshine, a

passion for cleanliness was the leading principle in domestic economy, and the universal test of an able housewife; a character which formed the utmost ambition of our unenlightened grandmothers. The front door was never opened except on marriages, funerals, New-Year's days, the festival of St Nicholas, or some such great occasion. It was ornamented with a gorgeous brass knocker curiously wrought, sometimes into the device of a dog, and sometimes of a lion's head; and was daily burnished with such religious zeal, that it was ofttimes worn out by the very precautions taken for its preservation. The whole house was constantly in a state of inundation, under the discipline of mops, and brooms, and scrubbing-brushes; and the good housewives of those days were a kind of amphibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabbling in water, insomuch that a historian of the day gravely tells us, that many of his townswomen grew to have webbed fingers like unto a duck; and some of them, he had little doubt, could the matter be examined into, would be found to have the tails of mermaids; but this I look upon to be a mere sport of fancy, or, what is worse, a wilful misrepresentatio...

The grand parlour was the sanctum sanctorum, where the passion for cleaning was indulged without control. In this sacred apartment no one was permitted to enter excepting the mistress and her confidential maid, who visited it once a-week for the pur. pose of giving it a thorough cleaning, and putting things to rights, always taking the precaution of learing their shoes at the door, and entering devoutly on their stocking feet. After scrubbing the floor, sprinkling it with fine white sand, which was curiously stroked into angles, and curves, and rhomboids, with a broom, after washing the windows, rubbing and polishing the furniture, and putting a new bunch of evergreens in the fireplace, the window-shutters were again closed to keep out the flies, and the room carefully locked up until the revolution of time brought round the weekly cleaning day.

As to the family, they always entered in at the gate, and most generally lived in the kitchen. To have seen a numerous household assembled around the fire, one would have imagined that he was tran

sported back to those happy days of primeval simplicity which float before our imaginations like golden visions. The fireplaces were of a truly patriarchal magnitude, where the whole family, old and young, master and servant, black and white, nay, even the very cat and dog, enjoyed a community of privilege, and had each a prescriptive right to a corner. Here the old burgher would sit in perfect silence, puffing his pipe, looking in the fire with half-shut eyes, and thinking of nothing for hours together; the goede vrouw on the opposite side would employ herself diligently in spinning her yarn or knitting stockings. The young folks would crowd around the hearth, listening with breathless attention to some old crone of a negro who was the oracle of the family, and who, perched like a raven in a corner of the chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon a string of incredible stories about New England witches, grisly ghosts, horses without heads, and hairbreadth oscapes, and bloody encounters among the Indians.

In those happy days a well-regulated family always rose with the dawn, dined at eleven, and went to bed at sundown. Dinner was invariably a private meal, and the fat old burghers showed incontestable symptoms of disapprobation and uneasiness at being surprised by a visit from a neighbour on such occasions. But though our worthy ancestors were thus singularly averse to giving dinners, yet they kept up the social bonds of intimacy by occasional banquetings, called tea-parties.

As this is the first introduction of those delectable orgies, which have since become so fashionable in this city, I am conscious my fair readers will be very curious to receive information on the subject. Sorry am I that there will be but little in my description calculated to excite their admiration. I can neither delight them with accounts of suffocating crowds, nor brilliant drawing-rooms, nor towering feathers, nor sparkling diamonds, nor immeasurable trains. I can detail no choice anecdotes of scandal, for in those primitive times the simple folk were either too stupid or too good-natured to pull each other's characters to pieces; nor can I furnish any whimsical anecdotes of brag; how one lady cheated, or another bounced into a passion; for as yet there was no junto of dulcet old dowagers who met to win each other's money and lose their own tempers at a card-table.

These fashionable parties were generally confined to the higher classes, or noblesse-that is to say, such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons. The company commonly assembled at three o'clock, and went away about six, unless it was in winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to iced creams, jellies, or syllabubs, or regaled them with musty almonds, mouldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy substantial fare. The tea-table was crowned with a huge earthen dish well stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up into morsels, and swimming in gravy. The company being seated around the genial board, and each furnished with a fork, evinced their dexterity in launching at the fattest pieces of this mighty dish, in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes. Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple-pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast of an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough fried in hog's fat, and called dough-nuts, or oly kocks; a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, excepting in genuine Dutch families.

herds and shepherdesses, tending pigs with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper tea-kettle, which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was, to suspend a large lump directly over the tea-table by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth-an ingenious expedient, which is still kept up by some families in Albany, but which prevails, without exception, in Communipaw, Bergen, Flat-Bush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea-parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting-no gambling of old ladies, nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones-no self-satis fied struttings of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in their pockets; nor amusing conceits and monkey divertisements of smart young gentlemen with no brains at all. On the contrary, the young ladies seated themselves demurely in their rush-bottomed chairs, and knit their own woollen stockings; nor ever opened their lips, excepting to say yah Mynheer or yah ya Vrouw to any question that was asked them; behaving in all things like decent well-educated damsels. As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed: Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages-that is to say, by the vehicles nature had provided them, excepting such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door; which, as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that time, nor should it at the present-if our great-grandfathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their descendants to say a word against it.

[A Rainy Sunday in an Inn.]

[From 'Bracebridge Hall."]