"Oh, ma'am, he says I am suffering from confusion of the brain, and your little children are not safe with me. It's long trouble, long grief,

ma'am !"

Oh, what

years of trouble-what ages of grief in her tone!

We afterwards found out that her friends-her father even-took away her earnings for drink, and then ill-treated her. She dreaded going home; she dared not stay "for fear"-she did not say of what, but our parental ears knew too well her meaning; and poor plasterer Jem was epileptic. She would go into an asylum, where they would let her work and do her good-that was all her cry.

What could we do towards clearing away this heap of misery from that fond, loving, humble heart? We thought-we inquired. No! no door was open to the poor girl; the doctor could not certify that she was mad (it was "effusion" on the brain that he had said)-she was not an idiot-and she was not safe. No one could say how near or how remote an attack of mania was. And her father's home could only extinguish

the light of reason.

"I don't believe she's Are we to hand

"The doctors are so fanciful," says my wife. dangerous-so good, so kind as she is to the children! her over to her brute of a father to make her mad ?" "No!" I cry, resolutely, flying to Mrs. Pickles's half suggestion, "let her stay, but watch her symptoms."

That night, I confess, I was morbidly nervous after the children had gone to bed, and would hold my breath to listen when she went upstairs, and, when she came down again, was troubled with a vision of her appearance at the door of the drawing-room with a bloody knife, exclaiming, "There, I've done it!"

I wheeled sharply round as she opened it, but she only said,

"Please, ma'am, may I kiss the children as usual when I go to bed?" "Certainly," says Mrs. Pickles," but mind your light."

"There, she's done it!" I cry, starting up in a climax of my troubled thoughts, as I hear her descending the stairs again.

"Oh, goodness gracious! done what?" exclaims my wife, springing to her feet. "Has she waked the children ?"

Ah! her thoughts were running in the same direction!

"God bless their little hearts," says poor Susan, opening the door gently, they're sleeping so prettily! But" (and her whole voice and manner changed), "pray lock their door, or DON'T LET ME GO NEAR 'EM

AGAIN!"

Of course we didn't-that was quite enough! Next day she left, anxiously, as if glad to get away.

Now what is to become of this poor lovelorn, woe-stricken girl, with the whole of her ingenuous heart fixed upon that steady, faithful, epileptic plasterer, who would marry her if his mother, the prosperous laundress, would let him? Where-where is the home for sick servants? Must she wait till she is mad?

Yes, I know, ladies and gentlemen-I thank you for the suggestion, but it does not just meet her case-there is the Union: God knows it, sure enough! where such a girl as this may be maddened or pauperised for ever. But it is one private charity I am looking for, among the thousand our noble country is always forming-I want the Home for Sick Servants. Or go a step further, and say the Home for Servants

out of Place. We should hear, oh, how much less of social evils, great and small, if charity would bear in mind in this case that prevention is ever so much easier than cure!

XII.

SOLOMON, MY NEPHEW.

I DON'T think I have ever so much as mentioned Solomon, my nephew; but he is a source of some anxiety to me just now. Poor fellow! he is as clever as an owl-and not unlike one in the face-but I cannot see clearly what is to become of him. Hang it! he keeps all his learning locked up in that impenetrable brain of his. He is not impulsive enough to write novels-he is too indolent to write treatises-he is too clever by half to write history at present prices. And so here he is, a great middleaged fellow, nearly as old as myself, always turning up after lapses of five years, looking out for something to start upon. He is the only son of my poor brother Peter-my eldest brother (I am the youngest of the family)—who has been dead these twenty years, and whom I only remember as the pattern and the model everlastingly held up and preached up to a large family by my revered father, when he used to come down among us, a grown man, to spend his holidays at Kremlin Coombe. That village used, in the good old days before the Reform Bill, to return two members to represent two people (rival landlords, who represented two hundred tenants) in parliament, and my father, being a voter and a maltster (not a farmer), was a man to be coaxed, caressed, and canvassed. Well, by never promising his vote nor recording it till the final struggle came, both candidates being equal on the poll, he got five of his sons into government situations-pity I was the seventh, unless I had had a seventh son, and I never got beyond a third-and Peter was a clerk in Chelsea Hospital when I was a boy at school. What he did at Chelsea Hospital I never knew, nor did my father, nor, I believe, did he himself exactly; but I have heard them say he had a room to himself, and was generally found at one o'clock with a rumpsteak and a pint of porter before him. So the late Duke of Wellington found him and many others on one occasion, and made a clean sweep of them-they were pensioned off at eighty pounds a year. Poor brother Peter grumbled and worried the Treasury, and got an appointment at last in the country as surveyor of taxes, and died in the act of counting windows at a house where some surreptitious lights had been introduced at the back. He was considered a good surveyor on the whole-he had an artful knack of extracting facts, and was very clever at surcharging. He would go to a house on the plea of examining for window-lights, and, as the unsuspicious housewife, in the absence of the husband, would lead him through the dark passage, he would blandly say, "I hope, ma'am, your dog won't bite me.'

"Oh dear, no, sir, he's very quiet," would be the unguarded reply; and down would go, "Dog, 8s."

But he died-I hope he didn't go where tax-collectors and excisemen are proverbially said to go-and left a great tall pillar of knowledge behind him, his son Solomon, who had been brought up for the medical profession, and who had cut up, boiled down, simmered, and analysed more human bodies than I should like to say, and knew all about the human economy.

But all his knowledge availed him not in practice. He tried it twice; his hands were too large-his manners too uncouth-his figure too ungainly-his costume too ungraceful. He certainly did get appointed to a country Union once, where he had a district of twenty miles in diameter, with a forest in the centre, where the gipsies used to encamp, and had a salary of eighty pounds a year for night and day work, but, although the poor liked him, he got into disfavour with the guardians. He once reported against the beer supplied to the Union as being unwholesome-the contracting brewer was brother to a guardian-the guardian was thenceforward his enemy, and poor Solomon's manners were never his friends, so the whole board took to thinking him disrespectful, and dismissed him.

He then began his wonderful career of dunning the government. He was well known at the Treasury-always representing his father's long services and his own wants. He was even affably received at the Colonial Office, and the demi-semi-ministers would say, "Ah, Mr. Solomon, come again? How are you? The colonial secretary's engaged this morning. I know he received your letter, and I dare say you will get a reply."

At last he gained the desired audience, and the colonial secretary told him he might call again; he would always be glad to see him. Oh dear me! where was the official conscience then? But Solomon took him at his word, and did call again, and again, and again. At last the minister, no doubt wearied beyond endurance, threw a gnawed bone to the hungry dog.

"There is an appointment vacant now, but I dare say, Mr. Pickles I'm afraid you will hardly accept it-the colonial surgeoncy of Sierra Leone. It's a fearful climate, of course, we all know; I have appointed twelve surgeons in half as many years; but still it's the only one open just now, and, of course, if you like to take the risk-ahem!—I hope you are not married, because, of course, to take a lady, or leave a familyahem!-I suppose you will not accept it?"

Wouldn't he! For, as he said, "That's just what they want. If I had declined it, they could have said, 'Well, we offered you an appointment which you refused.' But now, you see, uncle, I'm on the first round of the ladder!"

Well, he went, had the fever thrice, served his time, and came back again-"looking out" for government employment.

Again he was the nightmare of Treasury dreams-the gaunt ghost who haunted the Colonial Office. In the course of two years came another splendid opening; a consul was wanted for a Central American republic. The pay was so small and the danger so great that the minister felt ashamed to mention it; but away went gaunt nephew Solomon, her Britannic Majesty's consul at Squariaquha. Here two generals of Spanish origin took to fighting and trying to tear the flag of the republic to pieces; two hordes of banditti, headed by two military gentlemen unattached, took to mortal combat for the possession of the chief city of the republic; the inhabitants lay silently looking on with perfect indifference, for they could but be robbed, and it mattered not to them whether they were robbed by General A. or General B.; but, in the mêlée, her Britannic Majesty's flagstaff was broken, and her Britannic Majesty's consul ejected. Of course it was not worth while to send a frigate to know what it was all about, so Solomon was presumed to have

given some offence by his undiplomatic manners, and came home to be meekly rebuked and thenceforth shelved, his consular career at an end.

His manners, certainly, are at times far from pleasant. One day, soon after his return, I had had febrile symptoms, and asked him to look at my tongue.

"Your tongue's right enough," replied he, gruffly. "But feel my pulse, Solomon."

"Oh, there's nothing the matter with you. with the yellow fever! Haw! haw! haw!"

Unless I've infected you

I didn't see much to laugh at in the idea. But I was reduced to the necessity of watching my pulse myself, and was feeling it under cover of my coat-sleeve in the evening, when suddenly-it ceased!

"There!" I cried, bounding in the air, "it's all up now! My pulse has stopped!"

Still he sat like a statue-a very ungainly one.

"Solomon," I exclaimed, in my agony, the cold perspiration on my brow, "I've lost my pulse !"

"Of course you have," replied he, "your fingers slipped off. Haw! haw! haw!" he guffawed, looking over at Mrs. Pickles.

I suppose he was right, for it is nearly twelve months since the event occurred; but it tends to show what an uncouth fellow he is.

Soon afterwards he took it into his head to be an agent. Not a land agent, nor agent to the Sun Fire Office, nor agent for Holloway's pills, but a commission agent. Neither he nor I knew exactly what it was, nor did any one of whom we inquired; but he had heard of a man who had made a good bit of money in the line, so he took an office in the City, and mounted a brass-plate with the inscription, "Solomon Pickles, Commission Agent." And for weeks and weeks he sat patiently in that little office, waiting for business to come; but he only had two applications-one from a gentleman, without security, soliciting the loan of a hundred pounds, the other, an inquiry whether he could get for the applicant the odds upon Flying Jenny, the favourite for the Derby. So he sold his brass-plate, wrote a forlorn letter to the colonial secretary, and came down again to Turtledove Villa.

And now, what is to become of him I don't know. He is not a medical student of the modern school, who can be companionable in any society; he cannot smoke nor play at skittles; he abhors half-and-half; he doesn't borrow money or annoy the servant-girls. Even Mrs. Pickles admits that she cannot make him useful about the house. She only gave him the baby to hold for a few minutes while she ran down stairs, when, bump!-she knew it was the innocent's head on the floor; he had been off in one of his reveries again, but he cried more than the baby did when he thought he had hurt it.

And there he sits, poor old fellow! reading-or strides out to botanise -and I can't amuse him, for what do I know about medicine, and what does he know about anything else? What a thing it is to have a nephew as old as oneself, and much more clever! Perhaps if the right honourable the colonial secretary, who once edited this Magazine, should see these pages, he would try him again, and send him in charge of the next batch of convicts to Western Australia.

FRESH ARRIVALS FROM PARIS:

BONNECHOSE-BARANTE-LÉON FEUGÈRE.

GOODLY octavos from those exemplary libraires-éditeurs, Messieurs Didier et Compagnie, are coming in upon us thick and threefold. On the principle of first come first served, we begin with M. Emile de Bonnechose. A notice of the first two volumes of this HISTORY OF ENGLAND* appeared in our pages at the time of their publication. The concluding volumes of the work being now given to the world, we proceed to bestow on them such attention and space as are at our command -an amount by no means in proportion to the merits of the author. His original plan, it appears, had extended to six volumes. The revolution of 1848, however, upset his calculations. At least his publisher was of opinion that, in the unsettled state of feeling caused by that event-involving so entire a change in the literary dispositions of the public-it would be difficult to fix the attention of the French reader on a History of England in more than four volumes. M. de Bonnechose was not convinced. But he was compelled to acquiesce. The author's six-volume theory might be the best. But the publisher's four-volume plan must be submitted to, if publication was to take place. The historian has nevertheless adhered pretty closely, in all but form and arrangement, to his larger design, by the simple contrivance of adding bulk to his volumes, and in this way condensing into the licensed four almost the same number of pages that would else have been subdivided into the forbidden six.

His complete work he now offers to the world as an exposé général of the History of England, and by no means one of those books which are becoming so common under the name of résumés, in which the writers make a point of omitting nothing, but touch hastily on everything, without going below the surface of a single one. As opposed to this system of summary process, it is our author's aim, far less to tell all that can be told, than to make what he does tell intelligible: to effect which, in a limited space (for even four bulky volumes are scanty in this respect), he has to multiply what he calls les aperçus généraux, to make a pause whenever he comes upon the grand figures and epochs of the story, and to restrain or expand his narrative as the case may demand-the expansion being considerably less frequent than the restraint, for, says he, mixed-metaphorically, "I have felt, I confess, the constraints of my picture frame, and more than once has the tide overflowed, the dyke and washed the bank."

Modestly he avows his increasing mistrust of his powers, as the work went on, to deal with so large a theme, and master its high argument as he could wish. The encouraging reception his previous volumes met with in England itself, he thankfully commemorates-coming as he says

Histoire d'Angleterre jusqu'à l'époque de la Révolution Française, etc. Par M. Emile de Bonnechose. Tomes III., IV. Paris: Didier et Cie. (London: W. Jeffs). 1859.