ONE day, as I was going by

That part of Holborn christened High,
I heard a loud and sudden cry,

That chill'd my very blood;"
And, lo! from out a dirty alley,
Where pigs and Irish wont to rally,
I saw a crazy woman sally,
Bedaub'd with grease and mud.

She turn'd her East, she turn'd her West,
Staring like Pythoness possest,

With streaming hair and heaving breast,
As one stark mad with grief.
This way and that she wildly ran,
Jostling with woman and with man—
Her right hand held a frying pan,
The left a lump of beef.

At last her frenzy seem'd to reach
A point just capable of speech,
And with a tone almost a screech,
As wild as ocean bird's,

Or female Ranter mov'd to preach,
She
her" sorrow words."

gave

"Oh Lord! O dear, my heart will break, I shall go stick stark staring wild!

Has ever a one seen any thing about the streets like a crying lost-looking child?

Lawk help me, I don't know where to look, or to run, if I only knew which way

A child as is lost about London streets, and especially
Seven Dials, is a needle in a bottle of hay.
I am all in a quiver-get out of my sight, do, you
wretch, you little Kitty M'Nab!

You promised to have half an eye to him, you know
you did, you dirty deceitful young drab.
The last time as ever I see him, poor thing, was with
my own blessed Motherly eyes,

Sitting as good as gold in the gutter, a playing at making little dirt pies.

I wonder he left the court where he was better off

than all the other young boys,

With two bricks, an old shoe, nine oyster-shells, and a dead kitten by way of toys.

When his Father comes home, and he always comes home as sure as ever the clock strikes one, He'll be rampant, he will, at his child being lost; and the beef and inguns not done!

La bless you, good folks, mind your own consarns, and don't be making a mob in the street; O Sergeant M'Farlane! you have not come across my poor little boy, have you, in your beat? Do, good people, move on! don't stand staring at me like a parcel of stupid stuck pigs; Saints forbid! but he's p'r'aps been inviggled away up a court for the sake of his clothes by the prigs;

He'd a very good jacket, for certain, for I bought it myself for a shilling one day in Rag Fair; And his trousers considering not very much patch'd, and red plush, they was once his Father's best pair.

His shirt, it's very lucky I'd got washing in the tub, or that might have gone with the rest; But he'd got on a very good pinafore with only two slits and a burn on the breast.

He'd a goodish sort of hat, if the crown was sew'd in, and not quite so much jagg'd at the brim, With one shoe on, and the other shoe is a boot, and not a fit, and you'll know by that if it's him. Except being so well dress'd, my mind would misgive, some old beggar woman in want of an orphan,

Had borrow'd the child to go a begging with, but
I'd rather see him laid out in his coffin!
Do, good people, move on, such a rabble of boys!
I'll break every boue of 'em I come near,
Go home-you're spilling the porter-go home-
Tommy Jones go along home with your beer.
This day is the sorrowfullest day of my life, ever
since my name was Betty Morgan,

Them vile Savoyards! they lost him once before all along of following a Monkey and an Organ: O my Billy-my head will turn right round-if he's got kiddynapp'd with them Italians, They'll make him a plaster parish image boy, they will, the outlandish tatterdemallions. Billy-where are you, Billy-I'm as hoarse as a crow, with screaming for ye, you young sorrow! And sha'n't have half a voice, no more I sha'n't, for crying fresh herrings to-morrow.

O Billy you're bursting my heart in two, and my life won't be of no more vally,

If I'm to see other folk's darlins, and none of mine, playing like angels in our alley,

And what shall I do but cry out my eyes, when I looks at the old three legged chair,

As Billy used to make coaches and horses of, and there a'n't no Billy there!

I would run all the wide world over to find him, if I only know'd where to run,

Little Murphy, now I remember, was once lost for a month through stealing a penny bun,

The Lord forbid of any child of mine! I think it would kill me raily,

To find my Bill holdin up his little innocent hand at the Old Bailey.

For though I say it as oughtu't, yet I will say, you may search for miles and mileses

And not find one better brought up, and more pretty behaved, from one end to t'other of St. Giles's. And if I called him a beauty, it's no lie, but only as a Mother ought to speak;

You never set eyes on a more handsomer face, only it hasn't been washed for a week;

As for hair, tho' its red, its the most nicest hair when I've time to just show it the comb;

I'll owe 'em five pounds, and a blessing besides, as will only bring him safe and sound home. He's blue eyes, and not to be call'd a squint, though a little cast he's certainly got ;

And his nose is still a good un, tho' the bridge is broke, by his falling on a pewter pint pot; He's got the most elegant wide mouth in the world, and very large teeth for his age;

And quite as fit as Mrs. Murdockson's child to play
Cupid on the Drury Lane Stage.
And then he has got such dear winning ways-but
OI never never shall see him no more!
O dear! to think of losing him just after nussing him
back from death's door!

Only the very last month when the windfalls, hang 'em, was at twenty a penny!

And the threepence he'd got by grottoing was spent in plums, and sixty for a child is too many. And the Cholera man came and whitewash'd us all and, drat him, made a seize of our hog,It's no use to send the Cryer to cry him about, he's such a blunderin drunken old dog;

The last time he was fetched to find a lost child, he was guzzling with his bell at the Crown, And went and cried a boy instead of a girl, for a distracted Mother and Father about town. Billy-where are you, Billy, I say? come Billy, come home, to your best of mothers! scared when I think of them Cabroleys, they drive so, they'd run over their own Sisters and Brothers.

I'm

Or may be he's stole by some chimbly sweeping wretch, to stick fast in narrow flues and what not, be poked up behind with a picked pointed pole, when the soot has ketch'd, and the chimbly's red hot.

And

Oh I'd give the whole wide world, if the world was mine, to clap my two longin eyes on his face. For he's my darlin of darlins, and if he don't soon come back, you'll see me drop stone dead on the place.

I only wish I'd got him safe in these two Motherly arms and wouldn't I hug him and kiss him! Lauk! I never knew what a precious he was-but a child don't not feel like a child till you miss him.

Why there he is! Punch and Judy hunting, the young wretch, it's that Billy as sartin as sin!

a romantic walk with the two twins, and a

hair, and I'm blest if he shall have a whole bone in his skin!

[The disasters of a Cockney excursion in Hainault Forest occupy a few pages, of which here is a specimen :]

The Gipsy Party.

was

The Dryads of Wanstead were startled by the rumble of a well laden tax-cart up that avenue which once led to a princely mansion; and the vehicle at last stopped, and set down its insides and outsides just where the lines of trees branch off into another verdant alley. "It was," Mrs. Carnaby remarked, 66 a delicious green spot, and very handy to the Green Man for getting porter." Mrs. C assisted out of the cart; and then Miss Cwas lifted out by Mr. Hodges; and then the children were lifted out by the Mother; and then the nursemaid, an awkward, plain looking girl that nobody helped, tumbled out. In the mean time, Master C jumped out, all agog after blackberrying and bird-nesting; and had swarmed half up a tree before his mother's vigilance discovered, at a single glance, that he was tearing his trousers, and had his best clothes on. This was a bad setting out for the boy; and the horse was not better, for directly he got out of harness, and felt himself free and at grass, after two or three preliminary kicks and plunges, it occured to him to indulge in a roll, and so he rolled over a pigeon pie that was unfortunately unpacked, and finished by getting very much up with his fore-legs in a bottle of ginger-beer. But it was only a moment of enthusiasm; and, like other old nags, he betook himself to eating his green grass salad as gravely as a judge. None of the performers were fortunate in their debût. The first thing Mrs. Carnaby did in her hurry to save the pop, was to pop down one of the children on the basket of knives and forks; but it was a sharp child and soon got up again: and the first thing that the other twin did was to trip over a stump, and fall, as Betty nursemaid said, "with its face in a fuz." The first thing Mr. Hodges did, was to take Miss Carnaby round the waist and give her a smacking kiss; in return for which, as her first act, she gave him a playful push, that sent him with his white ducks, into a muddy miniature pond, that had recently been stirred up by a cow in search of a cold bath. The first thing that Mr. C. did was to recommend some brandy as a preventive against catching cold; but the last thing the brandy bottle had done had been to stay at home in the cupboard. Mr. Hodges, therefore, walked off to the Green Man for his health's sake; and Master Carnaby sneaked off, nobody knew where, for the sake of blackberries;-while the nursemaid, for the sake of society, took

race, and all the performers topped their parts; the very horse roamed away like a horse that had neither parish nor settlement; and Mr. Carnaby would have gone roaming after him, if his Wife and Daughter had not hung round his neck, and made him swear not to leave 'em till the others returned, which was afterwards softened down to taking a little walk, provided he didn't go out of sight and hearing. In the mean time Mrs. and Miss C- laid the cloth, and began to review the eatables, not without lamenting over the smash of the pigeon pie; and when they came to plan their second course, they found that the chief remove, a cold round of beef, had been pinned on the way down by a favourite bull-dog, that Master Carnaby had smuggled into the party. Luckily for the dog, he had also gone roving, with the whole forest before him, as naturally as if he had belonged to Bampfylde Moore Carew, the King of the Gipsies.

Mrs. Carnaby was one of those characters emphatically called fidgets: she never rested till each individual came back, and she never rested when they did. Mr. C- was the first to return, and not in the first of tempers. He had been done out of his long anticipated rural walk, by setting his foot, before he had gone a hundred yards, on a yard of snake, and it had frightened him so that Mrs. Carnaby expected "it would turn his whole mash of blood, and give him the yellow jaundice." Mr. Hodges came in second, but to the impatient eye of Miss C- certainly did not proceed from the Green Man with the straightness of a bullet from a rifle. Master Carnaby was a good third, for he had been well horsewhipped, just as he had got three little red blackberries and five thorns in his fingers, by a gentleman who did not approve of his trespassing upon his grounds. Boxer, the bulldog, was fourth; he came back on three legs, with his brindle well peppered with number six by the gamekeeper, to cure him of worrying park rabbits. In fact, poor Boxer, as Mrs. C. exclaimed, was "bleeding like a pig," and the grateful animal acknowledged her compassionate notice by going and rubbing his shot hide against her shot silk, in return for which he got a blow quite hard enough to shiver the stick of something between a parasol and an umbrella. As for the nursemaid and the twins they did not return for an hour, to the infinite horror of the mother; but just as they were all sitting down to dinner, Betsey appeared with her charge, walked off their feet, with their "pretty mouths all besmeared" with blue and red juice; but no one of the party was botanist enough to tell whether the berries they were munching were hips and haws, or bilberries, or deadly nightshade, but maternal anxiety made sure it was

the "rank pison." Accordingly dinner was postponed, and they set to get up an extempore fire to make the kettle hot, and as soon as the water was warm enough, these "two pretty babes" were well drenched, and were soon as perfectly uncomfortable as they had been two months before in a rough steam trip to Margate. As soon as peace was restored it transpired, from an examination of the children, and a very cross examination of the nursemaid, that they had met with a real gipsy woman in the forest who had told Betty's fortune, but had omitted to prognosticate that her mistress would give her warning on the spot, and that her gipsying would end, as it actually did, in finding herself suddenly out of place in the middle of a forest. Like other servants, when they lose a comfortable situation, "some natural tears she shed," but did not wipe them soon, as did " our general mother," for the very excellent reason that she had spread her pocket handkerchief on the ground to sit upon, somewhere between Wanstead and Walthamstow, and had left it as a waif to the lord of the manor.

[At length, the party settle to tea.]

Mrs. Carnaby, however, was happy; but "there is many a slip between the tea-cup and the lip." She was in the triumphant fact of pouring the hot water on her best souchong, in her best china tea-pot, when a very well charged gun went off just on the other side of the park palings, and Mrs. Carnaby had not been born like her Grace, old Sarah of Marlborough, "before nerves came

into fashion." The tea-kettle dropped from her hand upon the tea-pot, which it dashed to atoms, and then lay on its side, hot watering the daisies and the dandelions that had the luck to grow near it. "Misfortunes never come single," and the gun, therefore, acted like a double one in its inflictions; for no sooner did Boxer recognise its sound than he jumped up, and with an alarming howl dashed through the rest of the tea-service, as if he had absorbed another ounce of number six; a fresh shout from the bystanders welcomed this new disaster, and with the true spirit of "biting a bitten cur," they began to heap embarrassments on the disconcerted gipsyers. They kept pitching sticks into the fire till it grew a bonfire, and made cockshies of the remaining crockery; some audacious boys even helped themselves to bread and butter, as if on the principle that the open air ought to keep open house. As there were too many assailants to chastise, the only remedy was to pack up and take to the road as fast as they could, with a horse which they found with two broken knees, the consequence of his being too curious in the construction of a gravelpit. "You may say what you like," said Mr. Carnaby, in his summing up, "but for my part I must say of gipsying that it's impossible to take to it without being regularly 'done brown.""

[We are glad to perceive that Mr. Hood appreciates, as we think the town universally did, Miss Kelly's never-enough-to-be-admired Sally Simkins, whose lamentations have furnished a ballad.]

The Keepsake.

[THE list of contributors is as usual, richly dight with noble names, but those whose genius is their only honour here shown, have produced by far the best portion of the enter tainment. We have the Sandman, translated from Hoffman, by Lord A. Conyngham, and not a very lively affair; the Mortal Immortal, by the author of Frankinstein; the Caves of Groenendael, an episode of Waterloo, by Mr. Grattan; Lawrence Bayley's Temp. tation, a touching tale of sin and sorrow, by the Hon. Mrs. Norton; Love is the Best Physician, an affair of early attachment, by H. L. Bulwer, M.P.; the Two Barons, a melodramatic story of the Black Forest, by Leitch Ritchie ; and last but one in our notice, though first in merit, The Widowed Bride, by Sheridan Knowles: this is a beautifully told tale of passion, fraught with bright flashes of genius, and touches of affection that steal through the heart of the reader: it occupies forty pages, and cannot be so advantageously abridged as Miss Landon's prose contribution :

THE HEAD. BY L. E. L.

THE Countess Amalie de Boufflers was one of the very prettiest specimens of a pretty woman that Paris and nature had ever constructed. She had bright golden hair, always exquisitely dressed, whether sprinkled with powder, lighted with diamonds, and waving with feathers, or suffered to hang in the studied negligence of a crop à l'Anglaise. She had a hand as white as a lily, and nearly

as small; a foot and ankle as faultless as the satin slippers-which their artist said required the imagination of a poet to conceive, and the genius of a sculptor to execute; her walk was the most exquisite mixture of agility and helplessness that ever paid a cavalier the compliment of attracting his attention and requiring his aid; her dancing made the Prince de Ligne exclaim, " I understand the fables of mythology-Madame realizes the classic idea of the Graces." Never did any body dress so exquisitely; Raphael himself never managed drapery to such a flow of elegance, Correggio never understood half so well the arrangement of colours, and in the management of fan, flacon, scarf, handkerchief, and bouquet she was unrivalled-" the power of science could no further go." Beautiful she was not, for the imagination and the heart must enter into the composition of beautythat beauty which is both poetry and passion; but, after all, there is no word in French that translates our "beautiful," and who in her own sphere could have desired her to be what their language did not even express? Num

berless were the lovers whom she drove to despair-and many were those whom she did not! But all her petites affaires de cœur were arranged in the most perfect taste; no scenes, no jealousies, no brouilleries; these are things which a femme d'esprit always avoids.

Time past on as lightly as he always steps over flowers, Brussels carpets, marble terraces, green turfs, or whatever simile may best press a path without an impediment. Every day added one to the crowd of her adorers

people feel so safe in an admiration which is general; to think with others is the best plan of never committing yourself-the unsupported opinion runs such risks. But Fate is justly personified as a female, in so many caprices does she indulge; and one malicious fancy which she contrived was exceedingly displeasing to la belle comtesse. One night her husband entered her boudoir; a surprise disagreeable on many accounts, but most disagreeable in its consequences. With that perfect ease which constitutes perfect good breeding, he announced that an affair of honour forced him to leave the court for a while, and madame must be ready to accompany him to his chateau by daybreak. Amalie was horror-struck: she could have been so interestingly miserable about the count's misfortune-so useful in arranging matters: such an opportunity for general sympathy might never occur again; but though she had not had many experiences of the kind, yet one or two instances of a divided opinion convinced her, that when M. le Comte did make up his mind, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, it was not to be changed, and, it must be confessed, with no better reason. There is nothing in nature so impracticable as the obstinacy of your true husband; it is the insurmountable obstacle-the Alps no female vinegar can melt. Amalie knew her destiny, and submitted to it with as good a grace as she could. "Grace," as she afterwards observed, is a duty which a woman owes to herself on all occasions." The count thanked her, kissed her hand, and bowed out of the room, leaving her to console herself as she could, and Amalie rarely wanted the means of consolation. De Boufflers was him. self in despair at leaving Paris, and was only induced to take so rash a step from considering that his own chateau was preferable to the Bastile. In an agony of anticipated ennui he looked about for a resource; his wife's evil genius managed that her idea should occur to his mind. Every body said she was so charming, would not her company be better than none at all-or, worse than none at all-his own? The Comte de Boufflers was himself "the ocean to the river of his thoughts," and he decided that it was far better for half the salons in Paris to be desolés than to omit even so slight a precaution as his wife's company, when reduced to sixty miles from Paris, tapestried chambers, some fifty worm-eaten portraits, and an avenue with a rookery.

The chateau was, like the general run of chateaux left to a concierge and one or two old retainers, as dilapidated as their dwelling. A ghost had taken possession of one chamber -smoke of a second-a murder, ages ago, had been in a third-and a fourth swarmed with rats. The count sought refuge in shooting partridges from morning till night, and

the countess in despair and letter-writing. There is such a thing as friendship, for her epistles received answers full of condolences, regret, and dearer still, news. One letter, however, from l'amie intime, Madame de Bethune, made her feel almost as desperate as people do when they tear their hair, drown themselves, pay their debts, or commit any very outrageous extravagancy. The precious yet cruel scroll gave a full and particular account of a late fête at Marli. Marie Antoinette had decided on a taste for rural and innocent pleasure, and the whole court had grown rural and innocent to a degree. Nothing was to be seen but crooks, garlands, straw hats, and "white frocks with broad sashes," quite English: then they had a real-earnest mill and a boat, and the gardens were filled with groups enacting rustic scenes. It was enough to provoke a saint-though Amalie made no pretensions to such a character, whatever she might to that of an angel-to have every body else playing at a country life, while she was acting in reality. But the worst was yet to come; the part selected by the queen herself for " sa belle Amalie" had of necessity been given to Madame de Mirvane," who," pursued her informant, "looked pretty enough, but managed the dove, which she was to sit beneath a tree caressing, with no sort of grace. How differently would it have been perched on your mignon fingers! it was dreadful that such an interesting part, so simple and so tender, should have been so utterly wasted; but this will make her majesty still more in earnest about obtaining M. de Bouffler's return. What business has notre bon homme Louis with a gentleman's affair of honour ?” The only consolation which the countess could devise was to try how the new and simple costume would suit her; she could at least have the satisfaction of her own approval. The next day saw her seated beneath an old tree in the neglected garden, through whose boughs the sudden sunshine fell half green, half golden, as the light of the noon and the hue of the leaf mingled together. Her hair was carelessly combed back under a wide, black chip hat, with just un nœud du ruban; she wore the simplest of white dresses; and, as no dove could be procured, her paroquet was fastened with a silken string, and placed in an attitude on the prettiest hand in the world. But, alas! projects fail, strings break, and birds fly away, even from such a jailer as la belle Amalie; suddenly the slender fastening gave way, the paroquet spread its wings, and was soon lost amid the branches. In such a case there is but one resource, and the countess executed a most musical shriek; this being of no avail, "tears were in the next degree;" but the countess had no idea of wasting such interesting things as tears on herself, so she was returning to the chateau for assistance to recover her fugitive, when a