With regard to my own particular practice, I have often traced in autograph with my walking-stick on the sea-sand. I also seem to remember writing one with my fore-finger on a dusty able, and am pretty sure I could do it with the smoke of a candle on the ceiling. I have seen something like a very badly scribbled autograph made by children with a thread of treacle on a slice of suet dumpling. Then it may be done with vegetables. My little girl grew her autograph the other day in mustard and cress.

Domestic servants, I have observed, are fond of scrawling autographs on a teaboard with the slopped milk. Also of scratching them on a soft deal dresser, the lead of the sink, and, above all, the quicksilver side of a looking-glass-a surface, by the bye, quite irresistible to any one who can write, and does not bite his nails.

A friend of mine possesses an autograph-"REMEMBER JIM HOSKINS"-done with a red-hot poker on the back-kitchen door. This, however, is awkward to bind up.

Another but a young lady-possesses a book of autographs, filled just like a tailor's pattern-book-with samples of stuff and fustian.

The foregoing, sir, are but a few of the varieties; and the questions that have occurred to me in consequence of your only naming the genus, and not the species, have been innumerable. Would the gentleman like it short or long? for Doppeldickius, the learned Dutchman, wrote an autograph for a friend, which the latter published in a quarto volume. Would he prefer it in red ink, or black,-or suppose he had it in Sympathetic, so that he could draw me out when he pleased? Would he choose it on white paper, or tinted, or embossed, or on common brown paper, like Maroncelli's? Would he like it without my name to it as somebody favored me lately with his autograph in an anonymous letter? Would he rather it were like Guy Faux's to Lord Mounteagle (not Spring Rice), in a feigned hand? Would he relish it in the aristocratical style, i. e., partially or totally illegible? Would he like it-in case he shouldn't like it on a slate ?

With such a maze to wander in, if I should not take the exact

course you wish, you must blame the short and insufficient clue you have afforded me. In the mean time, as you have not forwarded to me a tree or a table,—a paving-stone or a brick wall, -a looking-glass or a window,-a teaboard or a silver plate,— a bill-stamp or a back-kitchen door,-I presume, to conclude, that you want only a common pen-ink-and-paper autograph; and in the absence of any particular direction for its transmission,— for instance, by a carrier-pigeon-or in a fire-balloon-or set adrift in a bottle-or per wagon-or favored by Mr. Waghornor by telegraph, I think the best way will be to send it to you in print.

I am, Sir,

Your most obedient Servant,
THOMAS HOOD.

Gape, sinner, and swallow."-Meg Merrilies.

It is now just a year since we reviewed Miss Martineau's “Life in the Sick Room," and left the authoress set in for a house-ridden invalid, alternating between her bed and the sofa; unable to walk out of doors, but enjoying through her window and a telescope the prospect of green downs and heath, an old priory, a lime-kiln, a colliery railway, an ancient church, a windmill, a farm, with hay and corn stacks, a market-garden, gossipping farmers, sportsmen, boys flying kites, washerwomen, a dairy. maid feeding pigs, the lighthouses, harbor, and shipping of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and a large assortment of objects, pastoral, marine, and picturesque. There we left the "sick prisoner," as we supposed, quite aware of a condition beyond remedy, and cheerfully made up for her fate by the help of philosophy, laudanum, and Christian resignation.

There never was a greater mistake. Instead of the presumed calm submission in a hopeless case, the invalid was intently watching the progress of a new curative legerdemain, sympathizing with its repudiated professors, and secretly intending to try whether her own chronic complaint could not be conjured away with a "Hey, presto! pass and repass!" like a pea from under the thimble. The experiment, it seems, has been made, and lo! like one of the patients of the old quacksalvers, forth comes Miss Martineau on the public stage, proclaiming to the gaping crowd how her long-standing, inveterate complaint, that baffled all the doctors, has been charmed away like a wart, and that, from being a helpless cripple, she has thrown away her crutches, literal or

metaphorical, and can walk a mile as well as any Milesian. And this miraculous cure, not due to Holloway, Parr, Morison, or any of the rest of the faculty, not to any marvellous ointment, infallible pills, or new discovery in medicine, but solely to certain magical gesticulations, as safe, pleasant, and easy as play. ing at cat's cradle-in short by mesmerism!

Now we are, as we have said before, the greatest invalid in England; with a complication of complaints requiring quite a staff of physicians, each to watch and treat the particular disease which he has made his peculiar study: as, one for the heart, another for the lungs, a third for the stomach, a fourth for the liver, and so on. Above all, we are incapable of pedestrian locomotion ; lamer than Crutched Friars, and, between gout in our ankles and rheumatism in our knees, could as easily walk on our head, like Quilp's boy, as on our legs. It would delight us, therefore, to believe that by no painful operation, but only a little posture-making behind our back or to our face, we could be restored to the use of our precious limbs, to walk like a leaguer, and run again like a renewed bill. But, alas! an anxious examination of Miss Martineau's statements has satisfied us that there is no chance of such a desirable consummation; that, to use a common phrase, "the news is too good to be true." We have carefully waded through the Newcastle letters, occupying some two dozen mortal columns of the "Athenæum," and with something of the mystified feeling of having been reading by turns and snatches in Moore's Almanac, Zadkiel's Astrology, a dream-book, and a treatise on metaphysics, have come to the sorrowful conclusion that we have as much chance of a cure by mesmerism, as of walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours through merely reading the constant advertisements of the Patent Pedometer. A conviction not at all removed by an actual encounter with a professor, who, after experimenting on the palms of our hands without exciting any peculiar sensation, except that quivering of the diaphragm which results from suppressed laughter, gravely informed us-slipping through a pleasant loophole of retreat from all difficulties-that "we were not in a fit state."

The precise nature of Miss Martineau's complaint is not tated; nor is it material to be known except to the professional nan; the great fact, that after five years' confinement to the house she can walk as many miles without fatigue, thanks to the nysterious Ism, "that sadly wants a new name," is a sufficient ubject for wonder, curiosity, and common sense, to discuss. A esult obtained, it appears, after two months passed under the hands of three several persons-a performance that must be reckoned rather slow for a miracle, seeing that if we read certain passages aright, a mesmerizer," with a white hat and an illuminated profile, like a saint or an angel," is gifted with powers little, if at all, inferior to those of the old apostles. The delay, moreover, throws a doubt on the source of relief, for there are many diseases to which such an interval would allow of a natural remission.

In the curative process, the two most remarkable phenomena were-1st, That the patient, with a weasel-like vigilance, did not go as usual into the magnetic sleep or trance; and, 2dly, That every glorified object before her was invested with a peculiar light, so that a bust of Isis burnt with a phosphoric splendor, and a black, dirty, Newcastle steam-tug shone with heavenly radiance. Appearances, for which we at once take the lady's word, but must decline her inference, that they had any influence in setting her on her legs again. The nerves, and the optic ones especially, were, no doubt, in a highly excited state; but that a five-year-old lameness derived any relaxation from the effulgence we will believe, when the broken heart of a soldier's widow is bound up by a general illumination. Indeed, we remember once to have been personally visited with such lights, that we saw two candles instead of one-but we decidedly walked the worse for it.

On the subject of other visionary appearances Miss Martineau is less explicit, or rather tantalizingly obscure; for, after hinting that she has seen wonders above wonders, instead of favoring us with her revelations or mysteries, like Ainsworth or Eugene Sue, she plumply says that she means to keep them to herself.

"Between this condition and the mesmeric sleep there is a state, transient and rare, of which I have had experience, but of which I intend to give no