and scraps of newspapers; and the bureau is open, and reveals a great
number of pigeonholes and divisions, filled with various odds and ends,
the collection of many years. In some of these compartments are bundles
of letters, very yellow, and tied in packets with faded tape; in another,
all by itself, is a fragment of plum-pudding stone, which Mr. Leslie has
picked up in his walks, and considered a rare mineral. It is neatly
labelled, "Found in Hollow Lane, May 21st, 1804, by Maunder Slugge
Leslie, Esq." The next division holds several bits of iron in the shape
of nails, fragments of horse-shoes, etc., which Mr. Leslie has also met
with in his rambles, and, according to a harmless popular superstition,
deemed it highly unlucky not to pick up, and, once picked up, no less
unlucky to throw away. Item, in the adjoining pigeon-hole, a goodly
collection of pebbles with holes in them, preserved for the same reason,
in company with a crooked sixpence; item, neatly arranged in fanciful
mosaics, several periwinkles, Blackamoor's teeth (I mean the shell so
called), and other specimens of the conchiferous ingenuity of Nature,
partly inherited from some ancestral spinster, partly amassed by Mr.
Leslie himself in a youthful excursion to the seaside. There were the
farm-bailiff's accounts, several files of bills, an old stirrup, three
sets of knee and shoe buckles which had belonged to Mr. Leslie's father,
a few seals tied together by a shoe-string, a shagreen toothpick case, a
tortoise shell magnifying-glass to read with, his eldest son's first
copybooks, his second son's ditto, his daughter's ditto, and a lock of
his wife's hair arranged in a true lover's knot, framed and glazed.
There were also a small mousetrap; a, patent corkscrew too good to be
used in common; fragments of a silver teaspoon, that had, by natural
decay, arrived at a dissolution of its parts; a small brown holland bag,
containing halfpence of various dates, as far back as Queen Anne,
accompanied by two French /sous/ and a German /silber gros/,--the which
miscellany Mr. Leslie magniloquently called "his coins," and had left in