renders the pageant still more effective. Lights are to be seen on all sides, and in all directions, from the temples, houses, tents, stalls, and huts; and, glancing among the trees, the European portion of the visitors drive home. to a late dinner, and their encampment forms a very pleasing spectacle, more quiet, but perhaps not so gay with lights and music, as that of the rich natives. At length the uproar, which has been kept up without intermission since daybreak, dies away, and either subsides into a faint murmur, or ceases; the greater number of lamps are extinguished, and silence and darkness prevail. It is at this time that the thieves, a dexterous and numerous class, are upon the alert, and, trusting to the adroitness for which they are famed, venture, in despite of the precaution taken against them, to steal the very habiliments which some cautious sleeper has placed beneath his pillow. A terrier dog proves the best security, but when fatigued by the toils of the day, the wearied animal sinks into profound repose, and sometimes fails to give timely warning. The scientific mode by which an experienced thief will obtain the sheet or other article disposed for safety under the pillow, is to tickle the sleeper's ear with a straw; this causes him to turn, a pull being given at the same time; and should the manœuvre not be immediately successful, it is repeated at a proper interval, and is pretty certain to answer the end proposed.

Formerly, before the East India Company obtained possession of Hurdwar and its adjacent districts, the fair seldom or ever concluded without battles and bloodshed. The priesthood belonging to the rival sects, of which Hindooism presents many, all of whom are impressed with the notion of the efficacy of the Ganges water, endeavoured to secure the greater portion of the alms collected for themselves. When they and their partisans were strong enough, force was employed in the attainment of this object; while lawless tribes, covetous of the wealth brought to the fair, attacked the merchants, who were obliged to defend their goods by armed retainers. A

very efficient police, under the direction of the European magistrates of the district, now prevents these wholesale robberies; and it is only the petty depredations of professional thieves which are to be apprehended at the present time. The sale of spirituous liquors in the fair is prohibited under a heavy penalty: thus one fertile source of evil is cut off. No one is permitted to enter the place armed. All offensive weapons are deposited with certain officials named Chaprassies, appointed by government to take charge of them; all have duplicatetickets, one of which is given to the owner, who, producing it upon his departure, receives his property back. At one particular period it is upon record that 700,000 swords were thus placed in the care of the chaprassies. But the fair is now said to be on the decline. Many people attribute this falling off to the belief now prevalent all over India, that the Christians are destined to spread their religion and customs throughout the land; an opiniou which renders vast numbers rather lukewarm in their attachment to the fooleries of the Brahmins.

THE MAN WHO KNEW EVERYBODY. SOME few summers ago, I spent several weeks at a pretty little watering-place, in one of the southern counties of Scotland. The village, during the period of my stay, was filled with visitors of all classes and descriptions. Numbers of real or imaginary invalids from among the wealthier orders of society, were spending at the spot their usual term of country residence, while many of a humbler rank were seeking relief from true illness by the use of the medicinal springs in the neighbourhood. Amongst all these various residents, for the time being, a perfect equality reigned, and, indeed, this was in a measure inevitable, seeing that there was no alternative between absolute solitude, and the adoption of such companions as chance was pleased to bring in the way.

Those who lodged in the inn of the village, in particular, being chiefly young men, like myself, who had come to while away a week or two in fishing and other amusements, were brought into daily and hourly fellowship, having to breakfast, dine, and sup at a common table, and, in short, enjoying nothing individually and undividedly but their bedrooms. For my part, I enjoyed this fortuitous associateship very much, for the three or four weeks of my residence in the village. A great part of this enjoyment was owing to one individual, the only person among my co-lodgers who had anything remarkable about him; the rest being idle, gentlemanly young fellows of an ordinary cast. Not that I mean to insinuate that the individual particularised was not as idle and gentlemanly as any of them; only, he was not an ordinary' personage, and there lay the distinction. The first extraordinary thing about him was, that nobody knew his name, or who and what he was, though he knew everybody, and all about everybody. He was generally termed 'Mr S.,' or the 'gentleman with the whiskers,' his visage being decorated with an ample pair of these appendages. The chamber-maid it was, I believe, who gave us this initial glimpse at his name, having observed the letters J. S. on his portmanteau. Genteel in his

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person, courteous, even to excess, in his manners, and scrupulously neat, if not elegant, in his attire, Mr S. was calculated, at first sight, to excite a prepossession in his favour; and on further intercourse with him, this impression certainly had no tendency to decrease. the everyday small-talk of society, he was a first-rate master; he abounded in anecdote of the most pleasing conversational kind, his stories generally relating to living persons of note and rank in the world: and what was best of all about the good things he told, he almost uniformly gave you them at first hand, exactly as they had fallen from the lips of the parties concerned, in his presence. No common-place culler and retailer of fiftytimes told and written bon-mots was the 'gentleman with the whiskers. Everything that came from his mouth

bore the stamp of freshness and novelty. You could not mention one man's name, but Mr S. would tell you something about him you never heard before.

The reader must have a touch of S.'s vein, in order to comprehend the mysterious curiosity respecting him that gradually crept over my mind while I lived beside him. This curiosity, as has been already said, none of the rest of our watering-place companions could gratify. He was unknown to all; though, strange to tell, several of them were at times firm in the belief that they had seen him somewhere before-but where or when they puzzled their brains in vain to recollect. Over my own mind a glimmering feeling of the same · kind occasionally came, and ended in the like dark uncertainty. The general impression among us came to be, that Mr S. was a man of consequence, who found it convenient, from some temporary pecuniary difficulty, to keep himself and his whereabouts quiet for a short while. How could we think otherwise, when we found a man capable of describing accurately, from personal observation, the appearance, dress, and manners of every peer and gentleman of note in the country? Suppose the subject of the turf and its heroes to be started by our little club of diners at the ordinary, out came S. with his observation-Odd lengths keen sportsmen do sometimes go, to be sure, with their passion for racing and betting. Some men, from morning till night, seem to think of nothing else; and though one would say that they could not carry on turf-sports and dine at the same time, yet I have actually known it done. I once heard Lord K offer a heavy wager at dinner, that he would leap his famous hunter Rozinante over a chair-back, directly in the face of a rousing fire. The bet was taken on the spot, and the stakes tabled. The horse was brought into the dining-room in a few minutes afterwards, and the chair placed, according to agreement, at the distance of a certain number of feet from the fire. His lordship mounted, and in another instant the docile animal had cleared the chair, and stood stock-still within a few inches

of the blaze.' After some remarks had been made by the company upon Mr S.'s anecdote, I chanced to observe, that where sportsmen could not conveniently make their dining-rooms a race-course or hunting-field, they could always bet, at least, and never could be at a loss for things to bet upon, as every one would allow, that recollected the story of the two sportsmen, who, when confined to the house on a wet day, commenced wagering with each other on the comparative speed of the rain-drops coursing down the window-panes.' S. instantly capped-as they say at Cambridge-my good old Joe Miller with an anecdote, fresh as a daisy, and which shewed his familiar intercourse with the great as much as the last one did. 'They don't always bet in a way so harmless to themselves,' said he of the initials. The well-known Murphy, as keen a sportsman as ever wore spurs, once laid a very heavy wager, that he would stick a hundred pins, of the common length, up to their heads in one of his limbs. He fulfilled his undertaking with the courage of a martyr, and won his bet. But the consequence of his feat was, that he was confined to bed for months, and ran the greatest risk of losing both his limb and his life. I heard the engagement entered into, but its execution, I believe, took place in his own bedroom. Not quite so dangerous to himself,' continued S., 6 was the manner in which another keen sportsman, Captain Murray, afterwards Lord E-exhibited his betting propensities. So proud was the captain of the iron firmness which a long course of hard exercise on horseback had given to his limbs, that he was in the habit of laying bets, that no one could nip or pinch him in that quarter of his body. When he could get nobody to take up such a wager with him, it was no uncommon thing for him to offer half-crowns, sometimes in a public market, to any one, groom, hostler, or jockey, who could succeed in effecting a nip?

Who, thought I and all present, when our friend with the whiskers gave us such stories as these-who is this, that is or has been so intimate with nobles and gentlemen of rank, as to have been a witness of the sayings and