To pheasant he was such a foe,
He tried the keepers' nerves;

They swore he never seem'd to have
Jam satis of preserves.

The Shooter went to beat, and found No sporting worth a pin,

Unless he tried the covers made

Of silver, plate, or tin.

In Kent the game was little worth, In Surrey not a button;

The Speaker said he often tried

The Manors about Sutton.

No county from his tricks was safe;
In each he tried his lucks,
And when the keepers were in Beds,

He often was at Bucks.

And when he went to Bucks, alas!
They always came to Herts;

And even Oxon used to wish

That he had his deserts.

But going to his usual Hants,
Old Cheshire laid his plots:

He got entrapp'd by legal Berks,
And lost his life in Notts.

SKETCHES ON THE ROAD.

THE DILEMMA.

Read! it's very easy to say read.-THE BUrgomaster.
I have trusted to a reed.-OLD PROverb.

"Hoy!-Cotch!-Co-ach!-Coachy!-Coachee!

—hullo !_hulloo !—woh!—wo-hoay?—wough-hoaeiouy!"—for the last cry was a waterman's, and went all through the vowels.

The Portsmouth Rocket pulled up, and a middleaged, domestic-looking woman, just handsome enough for a plain cook at an ordinary, was deposited on the dickey; two trunks, three bandboxes, a bundle, and a hand-basket, were stowed in the

hind boot. "This is where I'm to go to," she said to the guard, putting into his hand a slip of paper. The guard took the paper, looked hard at it, right side upwards, then upside down, and then he looked at the back; he in the meantime seemed to examine the consistency of the fabric between his finger and thumb; he approached it to his nose as if to smell out its meaning; I even thought that he was going to try the sense of it by tasting, when, by a sudden jerk, he gave the label with its direction to the winds, and snatching up his key-bugle began to play "O where, and O where," with all his breath.

I defy the metaphysicians to explain by what vehicle I travelled to the conclusion that the guard could not read; but I felt as morally sure of it as if I had examined him in his a-b-ab. It was a prejudice not very liberal; but yet it clung to me, and fancy persisted in sticking a dunce's cap on his head. Shakspeare says that "he who runs may read," and I had seen him run a good shilling's worth after an umbrella that dropped from the

coach; it was a presumptuous opinion therefore to form, but I formed it notwithstanding-that he was a perfect stranger to all those booking-offices where the clerks are schoolmasters. Morally speaking, I had no earthly right to clap an ideal Saracen's Head on his shoulders; but, for the life of me, I could not persuade myself that he had more to do with literature than the Blue Boar.

Women are naturally communicative: after a little while the female in the dickey brought up, as a military man would say, her reserve, and entered into recitative with the guard during the pauses of the key-bugle. She informed him in the course of conversation, or rather dickey gossip, that she was an invaluable servant, and, as such, had been bequeathed by a deceased master to the care of one of his relatives at Putney, to exert her vigilance as a housekeeper, and to overlook every thing for fifty pounds a year. "Such places," she remarked, "is not to be found every day in the year."

The last sentence was prophetic!

"If it's Putney," said the guard, "it's the very