tasks, with an unusual portion of smiles and pleasantries, and then looking
at his watch, he attempted hastily to rise! in vain--there seemed an
indissoluble bond of union between him and the chair; the most grotesque
series of strugglings ensued, and by one desperate effort he was erect, a
thin coating of the black leather which he had torn off, firmly adhering to
his dress! Nothing abated my delight at my success, but the thought that my
magnus Apollo, Pickle, was not there to enjoy it; to see the poor Count
stand mute with a mixed passion of rage and distress for several seconds,
and then to witness his fruitless attempts to view the full extent of the
injury, which, notwithstanding the surprising flexibility of his vertebrae,
he was unable to compass. Tom Pipes I felt certain would have died on the
spot, he must have split.

_The Inspector_.

* * * * *


CONTRAST OF CLIMATE.


Suppose yourself to have spent the first half of a foggy, sleety, chill,
moist, melancholy, English winter at some miserable country village in
Kent. Suppose about the first of February, while the whole landscape around
is still floating in mud, buried in snow, or fast bound by frost, and the
atmosphere so thick with fog, that one can scarcely point at mid-day to the
spot where the sun stands in the heavens,--that your catarrh grows so
alarming, that in a fit of despondency you trundle yourself aboard a ship
in the Downs getting under way for a warmer climate. Suppose, that after a
smacking run of about eight days before a fresh gale, (during the whole of