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climbed up by the leg, and pushed one of them off, and then rolling himself down after it, was proceding to drag it away by the neck to his hole under the fire-place, when the mother happened to return. Then ensued a battle-royal. Utterly unmindful of her usual caution, the infuriated parent dashed herself three separate times against the enemy, and was each time received with fixed bayonets. Never, probably, was there such an expenditure of spitting and fuming; but all to no purpose, for the hedgehog clung to his prey like a ferret. Had not the writer inter

"As hedgehogs doe foresee ensuing stormes, So wise men are for fortune still prepared." Into this hibernaculum, when the nights become chilly, and his food scarce, he betakes himself for his long winter's sleep; first, however, taking care to roll himself up in such a prodigious quantity of moss and dried leaves that the severest snows will leave him warm and dry. Unlike the rest of the sleepers, he accumulates no provisions. The only store he takes with him is a goodly layer of fat about the viscera and under the skin, which is slowly absorbed, as the waste of his inactive life requires. With the first warm beams offered, and caused the hedgehog to drop spring he wakes up lean and hungry; and it is said that in this voracious condition he will attack almost anything, and has even been known to break his fast upon a hen.

The disposition of the hedgehog may be very considerably modified by taming. James Dousa, the celebrated Dutch scholar, had a pet one which followed him about, and evinced the greatest attachment for his person. When it died, Lipsius immortalized its memory in some Latin verses, almost as rough and unpoetical as the subject. In London they are much used to destroy the black beetles which abound in the underground kitchens; and many instances are recorded of their becoming familiar with those who treat them kindly. The writer formerly had one who used to know his name, "Spot," very well, and would directly uncoil himself at the sound of his master's voice. He had so far overcome his natural timidity as to lie before the fire in company with a cat and dog. With the latter he was on very friendly terms; but the cat and he always regarded each other with mutual aversion. Every now and then, without the slightest provocation, he would suddenly open and bite her leg or tail, and then instantaneously contract himself again with a Touch-me-ifyou dare kind of air, which was vastly amusing. This may have been the mere exuberance of hedgehog spirits, but it was a great deal too much like earnest to make it pleasant for pussy, who, however, never ventured to retaliate, for she had probably found that his prickles were more than a match for her claws. She contrived to kitten upon a table, in order that her young should be out of his reach; but one day, during her absence, he VOL. XI.-26

the kitten, it would probably have been rent in two between the combatants. The cat was much pricked all over her face and shoulders, and the hedgehog had some ugly scratches under his throat.

The uses to which the hedgehog has been put are numerous. Among the peasantry on the continent, and in many parts of England, it is used as food to a considerable extent. Hedgehogdumpling is by no means an uncommon cottage-dinner in Buckinghamshire. The flesh of the young animal is very white, and not unlike rabbit. Among the Romans the spines were extensively used in carding wool, and several decrees of the senate are extant against the rich woolstaplers, who were in the habit of buying them all up, and thus forestalling the market. According to Albertus Magnus, the right eye of a hedgehog, fried in oil, and kept in a brass vessel, imparts a virtue to the oil, so that when used as an ointment to the eye it imparts such a wonderful clearness of vision, as to enable a person to see as well by night as by day! The fat is still believed by our countryfolks to be very efficacious in deafness, and many a hedgehog falls a martyr to the delusion.

We were about taking leave of our hero without saying a word about his domestic relations. He chooses his mate early in the spring, and it is said remains constant to her during the season; but they must be very knowing people who can speak positively upon such a delicate subject. She usually produces from two to four at a time. When first born they are very pretty little animals, with soft white spines and hanging ears. As they approach maturity the thorns become harder and darker, and the ears become erect.

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A

SCENES FROM COUNTRY LIFE.

UTUMN, the favorite season of most

poets, is thus described by Keats: SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatcheaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd and plump the hazelshells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, [hook
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy
Spares the next swath and all its twined
flowers;

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by [are they? hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

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Then in a willful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now, with treble soft, The redbreast whistles from a garden croft, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The village inn, at this particular season of the year, was, in days gone by, and to some extent is so still, the great center of attraction. Our engraving represents an old English inn, as it existed in the days of the "magnanimous Goldsmith," whose charming description of it is well known to all classes of readers. Here is another tribute to autumn, from the pen of Jonathan Freke Slingsby:

THE Autumn light is sleeping
Upon the yellow plain;
The harvest-men are reaping

The swarths of golden grain;
The merry maids the furrows throng,
And bind the sheaves with cheerful song,
While children stoop the ears to glean
That fall the maidens' hands between.

At length, with day's declining,

The westering sun sinks bright; The harvest moon, now shining, Floods heaven with mellow light; Upon the greensward merrily, To notes of rustic minstrelsy, Young men and maidens, free from care, Dance in the evening autumn air.

Now sere the leaves are growing

With many a russet streak,Just like the death-bloom glowing On a dying maiden's cheek.

Now bleakly blows the autumn breeze,
And sweeps the leaves from moaning trees,
And rain by day and frost by night
O'er spread the flowers and fields with blight.

But though the leaves are dying,

And flowers have lost their bloom,
Though blight on earth is lying,

And heaven is fill'd with gloom,
O trustful heart! be of good cheer,
For time brings round the rolling year;
When winter, and spring, and summer are o'er
The golden autumn will teem once more.

THE GRAVES OF WORDSWORTH AND
HIS RELATIVES.

stray fancies, what chance musings, and recovered associations, he may have thus picked up from the green bosom of his dear mother earth, and bound together in bundles with the beautiful thread of poesy? On this occasion he talked as if this were the natural process of his mind; and stopping suddenly, he exclaimed, " Pardon me; that is too fine a one to be passed by." "He was doing this," said Mr. Quillinan, "when I first encountered him, thirty years ago." And here we are, meditating among the remarkable cluster of graves in the Grasmere church-yard. The principal one, with the name of William Words

Wa late number of the Leisure Hour,

E shall never forget, says a writer in worth on it, and nothing more, is as

one of our earliest interviews with the poet Wordsworth. He was strolling along under the fine trees of Rydal Hall, with a bundle of sticks under his arm, to which he was continually adding as he went dreamily along. This was his constant habit; and who knows what pleasant thoughts, what

eloquent as it is touchingly simple. There are other graves beside his, under those dim yew-trees; the grave of his only daughter, the beloved and refined Dora Quillinan; the grave of her husband, the elegant scholar, graceful poet, and choice companion, Edward Quillinan; the grave of Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, one in

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whom the light of genius flared up so fitfully that the clay which held it soon became scorched and shivered; and, once more, the grave of the gifted but wayward Hartley Coleridge. Poor Hartley! What tides of hereditary eloquence have poured from his lips, while we have sat by and wondered! How has he suddenly drawn up his bent and degraded-looking figure into the dignity of an intellectual man, while the dull eye has startingly told of the power that was chained within! We have grounds for the hope that, in the quiet of that chamber of death, the captive was in every sense set free, and the contrite spirit received into the glorious liberty of the redeemed.

IN

THE LOTTERY TICKET.

Na remote part of the city of Padua, near the ancient church of Santa Sofia, was, and is probably there still, an old house, inclosed by walls, and approached by large gates, which were seldom or never opened; the mode of ingress being by a small wicket gate at the side.

The outer aspect of the house was dull and gloomy, for almost all the windows opened on to an inner court, which was surrounded on the four sides by the building. The open staircase was in one corner of the edifice, and the different rooms above stairs were approached by open balconies, in the old Italian fashion. Few of the apartments had fire-places, and seldom was smoke seen to issue from the funnelshaped chimneys, common in Padua and other localities near Venice, which seemed designed rather for the admission of rain and snow than for the exit of smoke. The owner and occupier of this silent and gloomy dwelling was an elderly man, of retired and penurious habits. Giuseppe Balducci, for such was his name, inherited from his father a small independence, which was believed greatly to exceed his expenditure. His parsimonious habits increased with his years, and from being at first only economical, he became miserly. He had but few friends, and an acquaintance seldom crossed his threshold. Indeed, such was his reputation for stinginess, that it was a common saying of his tenants to whom he gave receipts (the only thing he was ever known to give) for the rent they owed him, that in order to save ink, he would neither cross a t nor dot an i.

At the period to which my story relates, his whole establishment consisted of one female servant, who had attained the mature age of fifty. Bettina had been brought up by the mother of Balducci, and, after the death of her mistress, had been transferred to the ménage of the son, in which she had faithfully discharged the duties of cook, housekeeper, and maid of all work, for upward of twenty years, and had attained, as far as it was possible for any one to attain, the confidence of her master. She was active and industrious, and long habit had familiarized her with the miserly ways of Balducci. Bettina had also another advantage in the eyes of her master she was so plain that Balducci had never been annoyed by suitors for the hand of his servant, and it was currently reported that Bettina had never had a lover.

Balducci was not more indulgent to Bettina's female acquaintance than he would have been to her friends of the other sex. He admitted none of them within his house; for he had a horror of gossiping, and was so far conscious of his eccentricities as to be unwilling to afford opportunities of their becoming a subject of conversation to his neighbors. Bettina, however, made up for her silence and solitude at home, by the good use she made of her tongue and ears when going to, or returning from, mass or market.

One morning Bettina went to purchase provisions at the market held in the Piazza in front of the Palazzo della Ragione, the ancient Town-hall of Padua. The morning was cloudy, and just as she had finished her marketing the rain, which had been threatening all the morning, began to fall.

Now, when it rains in Italy, especially during the autumn, and this was in the month of November, it rains in earnest. There are none of your half-measuresScotch mists or gentle showers-but regular downright rain, falling straight as a plumb-line, not in drops, but in streams, as if it had been poured out of a bucket; a rain that would almost wet a man to the skin before he could open his umbrella. Bettina was not exactly prepared for such a rain as this; she hoped, in fact, to reach home before the rain came, for she could not carry at the same time her heavy basket, and one of the large and clumsy umbrellas, covered with waxed cloth, gen

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