somehow or other, things have n't turned up all trumps, as we expected." He then proceeded to give a detail of the various grievances he had suffered, stating the scandalous dilapidation of Brambletye House, and the legal difficulties, he still experienced in regaining full possession of his estate. Having dwelt at some length upon these particulars, and received from Jocelyn in return a full account of all his adventures in Paris, the baronet prepared, though not without considerable embarrassment, to break to his son the intelligence of his marriage. Assuming, accordingly, after two or three preparatory hems, the swaggering yet sheepish look of a man who is resolved to face down his own exposure, he exclaimed-"Jocelyn, my boy, or rather my spruce blade, for you look more like my lord's man-at-arms than the lady's page you were when you quitted Brambletye ;-no more birdbolts will you shoot now at the rooks in the Friar's copse; no more foot-ball at Christmas; no more galloping round the moat, with a spit at your poney's side, to run a tilt at a turnip upon a broomstick; bat, ball, and quoit, will all come amiss to the hand that has couched a lance, and carried off a Mounseer's helmet before the King of France : the pranks of Bottom the weaver, Simpleton the smith, John Swabber, and Maid Marian, will no longer amuse you, when the morris dancers come to beat up our quarters; I am getting almost too old, God help me! for joining your sports, either

with dog or net, hawk or hunter, fishing-rod or fowling-piece; I knew you would find Brambletye plaguy dull, devilish lonesome, and so—”

"My dear Sir!" interrupted Jocelyn, wondering whither this introduction was to lead, "I beg you will discard every such idea from your mind; nothing will delight me more than to explore all my old haunts, and revisit the nooks and glens of Ashdown forest, where I have so often gone a nutting when a boy."

"Od's life, Jocelyn, do n't tell me; I know bet ter, you would have been dull, horribly dull, cursedly dull, moped to death; and so I have hit upon a little expedient which I am sure you will admitOh! Jocelyn, my boy, there is no solace, no consolation, nothing after all, like a woman's love."

Our hero (for so we shall venture henceforth to call him), who imagined that his father had been providing a wife for him, and who reverted with all the fervour of a first impression to the two black eyes which had so suddenly smitten him at the carousal, was by no means disposed to second these matrimonial arrangements, and therefore replied -"All this is undoubtedly true, but surely, Sir, I am as yet too young to think of marrying."

"If you are, I am not," said the baronet, "and, therefore, just to make the house a little bit tidy, as well as more lively and comfortable for you, I' have provided another Lady Compton to manage matters, and keep the household in order."

"Married!" exclaimed our hero, in utter astonishment-" you never mentioned it in any of your letters."

"Didn't I? why then I suppose I must have forgotten it; and that 's odd enough too, for I 'm sure I've thought of nothing else since it happened."

"Most cordially do I give you joy, Sir," exclaimed Jocelyn, affectionately pressing his father's hand.

Why that's hearty, my brave boy," cried Sir John, returning the squeeze with a force that made the fingers crackle in his grasp. "Joy! od's bobs, we 'll have nothing but joy, and you shall begin by wishing it me in a hoghan-moghan glass of claret :

'Come, a brimmer, my bullies, drink whole ones or nothing,

Now healths are not voted down.

'Tis sack that can heat us, we care not for cloathing,

A gallon 's as warm as a gown.'

Zooks, I'm glad you 're come again, for I was beginning to lose all my old snatches. They 're nothing unless we have some one to match 'em with a rousing chorus." He slapped Jocelyn heartily on the shoulder, as he concluded his speech, and immediately after began to troll at the top of his voice, "The merry Good-fellow," one of his favourite ballads, repeatedly declaring that he was as happy as a king; but our hero began to suspect the feli

city that required such boisterous confirmation, especially as he thought he could, at times, detect a forlorn and lugubrious look in the midst of all this forced and rampant hilarity.

These suspicions were confirmed when Sir John, after having rendered his son in some degree responsible for his marriage, by declaring that it was incurred to give him a more cheerful home, began, after the following fashion, to make his first wife answerable for the second, determined, that if blame fell any where, it should not attach to himself. "Zooks! Jocelyn, it was very thoughtless of your mother to leave me as she did; a lone man at my time of life, accustomed to a comfortable home :what could she expect, how could I do otherwise?"

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'My poor mother, I presume, had no choice to exercise when she left you," said Jocelyn," and as so many years had elapsed since her death

"All her own doing," cried Sir John, rendered at once unfeeling and unjust by a sense of the annoyances her loss had entailed upon him; "all her own doing-I told her how it would end when she took to drinking the Tunbridge waters. But hang sorrow, and a fico for old griefs; you will have a brave substitute, Jocelyn, for your stepmother is a rare housewife, frugal and thrifty; we shan't want any save-alls. Ay, and a comely dame too, though not so buxom as she was; for since she took to dining upon water zootje, and drinking

small beer, she has become a trifle fishy in the face, and a thought sowish in the figure."

"Saar Jan! Saar Jan! mijne waarde!" cried a husky gutteral voice from without, while the party thus invoked exclaimed, with a chop-fallen look— "'Sblood! here she is." The door opened, and Jocelyn was introduced to the new Lady Compton, whose attractions, rather from the effects of a sedentary life, and the fore-mentioned diet, than from the lapse of time, had been woefully on the wane since she was kissed by the King at Bruges. Her complexion was wan and sodden, her dull grey eyes had no brows, a sandy mustachio had sprung up on either side of her upper lip, which would have seemed more bristling and obtrusive, but that it matched the colour of the skin; and of her undulatory and multitudinous figure it is sufficient to say, that it justified her husband's coarse epithet. Nor were her attractions embellished by her costume, her parsimonious system not having allowed her to buy new clothes till she had worn out those she had im

ported from Holland. A coif, with two laced streamers, confined her hair, which was dressed backward from the forehead; two huge gold earrings reposed upon her ample shoulders; her gown of green Paragon, edged with Brussels lace, was decorated at the stomacher with a profusion of gilt buttons and crossings of gold filligree; her waist, ample as it was, acquired a comparative tenuity from the prodigious expansion of the hips, in whose