was, moreover, bowed like a pothook; and, as at first was thought, that its deformity might be fully seen, was without hose or shoe; in plain words, it was a naked leg. The dwarf was followed by six horsemen, handsomely arrayed and strongly mounted.

The procession halted before the burgomaster's door, when the heralds, putting their trumpets to their lips, blew so loud a blast that every man's money danced in his pocket. The crowd, with gaping mouths and ears, awaited the proclamation of the herald, who thus unburthened himself :"Let it be known to all corners of the creation, that our most noble, most puissant master, now present, the right valorous and worthy Vandenhoppenlimpen, has the most perfect right leg of all the sons of earth. In token whereof he now exhibiteth the limb; whereat let all men shout and admire !"

On the instant the dwarf cocked up his withered stump, self-complacently laying his hand upon his heart; and at the same moment the crowd screamed and roared, and abused and reviled the dwarf, whilst some market-women discharged ancient eggs and withered apples at him, until the procession, followed by the roaring populace, made their way back to their hostelry.

The next morning, at the same place and like hour, the same proclamation was made. Again the undaunted dwarf showed his limb, and again he was chased and pelted.

And every day, for six months, the unwearied heralds proclaimed the surpassing beauty of Vandenhoppenlimpen's right leg, and every day the leg was exhibited. And after a time every day the uproar of the mob decreased, and the leg was considered with new and growing deference. “After all, we must have been mistaken-there surely is something in the leg," said one contemplative burgher.

"I have some time thought so," answered another.

"Tisn't likely," said a third, that the man would stand so to the excellence of his leg, unless there were something in it, not to be seen at once."

"It is my faith," said the burgomaster's grandmother, a faith I'll die in, for I have heard the sweet man himself say as much a hundred and fifty times, that all other right legs are clumsy and ill-shaped, and that Vandenhoppenlimpen's leg is the only leg on the earth made as a leg should be."

In a short season this faith became the creed of the mob; and oh, how the neighbouring cities, towns, and villages emptied themselves into Utrecht, to gaze and marvel at Vandenhoppenlimpen's leg! When he died a model of the limb was taken, and cast in virgin gold, and is now used as a tobacco-stopper on state occasions at the Stadt-house of Utrecht.

My child, there are at this moment many Vandenhoppenlimpens eating bread very thickly buttered, from having stoutly championed the surpassing merits of their bowed and buckled right leg.

A FEW LAST WORDS. PUNCH REVIEWS HIS LABOURS. THE LOTTERY OF LIFE.

PUNCH'S LAST LETTER.

Reflecting upon

WELL, my son, I now approach the end of my labours. what I have written, I feel that I may in a double sense call myself your father. You are not merely the offspring of my loins, but I trust I may say I have begotten your mind.

Yes, I have thrice scratched my head, and feel that I have nothing more to say to you. I have now merely to contemplate-with that delicious self-complacency which plays the divinest music on a man's heart-strings-the beauty and excelling utility of the labour undertaken by my parental love. I have now only to lean back in my easy chair, and twisting my thumbs, see, with dreaming eyes, my beloved child playing a most prosperous part in this eventful world. Let others call it a vale of tears,-you, my son, will walk through it with a continual chuckle. Let others groan over the uncertainty of daily bread; you, my son, will have "your teeth white with milk, and your eyes red with wine." Let others look with longing glance at pauper sixpences, you-for you have taken your father's counsel-will know where to lay your hand upon ingots.

Consider, my son, what gratitude you owe to destiny for making you what you are. You are the son of PUNCH. You might have been the child of a Lord Chancellor. From your cradle you inherited a wisdom denied to millions of others. Had you been born to finest cambric and Brussels lace, you had never been taught the beautiful truths of life, which it has been my paternal care to tattoo in your adolescent mind The son of PUNCH! Consider, my child, the many, many million chances you had against your being this, and be grateful for your exceeding felicity.

Mr. William Wordsworth says,

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar."

Now, for a moment adopting this poetical conceit, imagine the millions of souls about to be despatched to this world, as a sort of penal settlement

an uncomfortable halfway house, on the road to immortal fields of asphodel. Have you seen whole clouds of swallows congregating on the sea-shore for their mysterious flight to-where, still remains a mystery? This multitudinous fluttering of wings can give you but the poorest idea of the gathering of human souls, bound to earth, and “trailing clouds of glory” from the home they are about to leave. Your finite apprehension cannot grasp the marvel in its entirety; yet it may do something. You see the myriads of winged souls-you hear their fluttering; you see that they are like one another, as swallow is like to swallow; their chirp is in the same key; no soul asserts a dignity over its fellow-voyager; each has the same length of wing, the same hue of feather. These are souls not yet provided with lodgings; they are souls, so to speak, in the abstract. Well, swoop they come down on earth, and like the swallows I have spoken of, take their residence in clay.

Alas and alas, poor souls! Some are doomed to coal-pits, some to arsenic mines, some dig in misery and darkness, some toil and toil, and hunger and hunger; and every day is but the wretched repetition of the past. And yet with all this certain evil grinding and crushing of thousands, how few among them would consent to draw their lot again, if Destiny were to hold forth her human lucky-bag, to give another chance! "No, no,” says the Hottentot, with a proud downward look at his girdle of sheep's-gut--"no, no; I don't draw again; for who knows I might come up a Dutch boor?" "No lucky-bag for me,” cries the Esquimaux; "I might lose my delicious whale-blubber, and turning up an Englishman be doomed to beef and porter." "Much obliged to you," says the poor idiot with a goitre at his throat as big as a foot-ball—“ I hear there are such folks as Patagonians; straight-limbed fellows, seven feet high; no lucky-bag for me— —I might be one of them."

If such, then, be the contentment of the great mass of the suffering world, how prodigious should be your felicity to know that you are the son of PUNCH!-to feel that you hold a position, the proudest, the noblest, the

If the reader be a father, surely, surely he will sympathize with my feelings.

I had not heard from my son for a long time. I was thinking of him, when I was startled by the knock of the postman. I know not how it was; but the smitten iron sent a chill through my heart, and the goosequill fell from my fingers.

Our landlady-we were then in lodgings—brought me up a letter. My wife was happily from home; called to assist at a neighbour's labour. I immediately recognised the handwriting of my son, and with trembling fingers broke the wafer. I give the contents :

"Condemned Cell, Newgate. “HONOURED PARENT,—I have to the best of my abilities followed

the advice sent to me from time to time in your letters. You will, therefore, as the Ordinary says; not be surprised to find I write from this place. It is a case of mutton, and I am to be hanged on Monday.

"Your Son,

"PUNCH, THE YOUNGER. “P.S.—You will find that in spite of my misfortunes I have the credit of my family still at heart. I shall therefore be hanged as John Jones." My heroic boy kept his word; and until this very hour his mother is ignorant of his fate, believing him to be at this moment Ambassador at the Court of--

JOB CAUDLE'S INTRODUCTION.

(MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES.)

POOR Job Caudle was one of the few men whom Nature, in her casual bounty to women, sends into the world as patient listeners. He was perhaps, in more respects than one, all ears. And these ears Mrs. Caudle —his lawful wedded wife, as she would ever and anon impress upon him for she was not a woman to wear chains without shaking them-took whole and sole possession of. They were her entire property; as expressly made to convey to Caudle's brain the stream of wisdom that continually flowed from the lips of his wife, as was the tin funnel through which Mrs. Caudle in vintage-time bottled her elder wine. There was, however, this difference between the wisdom and the wine. The wine was always sugared; the wisdom never. It was expressed crude from the heart of Mrs. Caudle, who doubtless trusted to the sweetness of her husband's disposition to make it agree with him.

Philosophers have debated whether morning or night is more conducive to the strongest and clearest moral impressions. The Grecian sage confessed that his labours smelt of the lamp. In like manner did Mrs. Caudle's wisdom smell of the rushlight. She knew that her husband was too much distracted by his business as toy-man and doll merchant to digest her lessons in the broad day. Besides, she could never make sure of him; he was always liable to be summoned to the shop. Now from eleven at night until seven in the morning there was no retreat for him. He was compelled to lie and listen. Perhaps there was little magnanimity in this on the part of Mrs. Caudle; but in marriage, as in war, it is permitted to take every advantage of the enemy. Besides, Mrs. Caudle copied very ancient and classic authority. Minerva's bird, the very wisest thing in feathers, is silent all the day. So was Mrs. Caudle. Like the owl, she hooted only at night.

Mr. Caudle was blessed with an indomitable constitution. One fact

will prove the truth of this. He lived thirty years with Mrs. Caudle, surviving her. Yes, it took thirty years for poor Mrs. Caudle to lecture and dilate upon the joys, griefs, duties, and vicissitudes comprised within that seemingly small circle-the wedding ring. We say seemingly small; for the thing, as viewed by the vulgar naked eye, is a tiny hoop, made for the third feminine finger. Alack! like the ring of Saturn, for good or evil, it circles a whole world. Or to take a less gigantic figure, it compasses a vast region: it may be Arabia Felix, and it may be Arabia Petræa.

A lemon-hearted cynic might liken the wedding-ring to an ancient circus, in which wild animals clawed one another for the sport of lookers on. Perish the hyperbole! We would rather compare it to an elfin ring, in which dancing fairies made the sweetest music for infirm humanity.

Manifold are the uses of rings. Even swine are tamed by them. You will see a vagrant, hilarious, devastating porker-a full-blooded fellow that would bleed into many, many fathoms of black pudding—you will see him, escaped from his proper home, straying in a neighbour's garden. How he tramples upon the heart's-ease! how, with quivering snout, he roots up lilies-odoriferous bulbs! Here he gives a reckless snatch at thyme and marjoram, and here he munches violets and gillyflowers. At length the marauder is detected, seized by his owner, and driven, beaten home. To make the porker less dangerous, it is determined that he shall be ringed. The sentence is pronounced-execution ordered. Listen to

his screams!

"Would you not think the knife was in his throat?
And yet they're only boring through his nose!"

Hence, for all future time, the porker behaves himself with a sort of forced propriety, for in either nostril he carries a ring. It is, for the greatness of humanity, a saddening thought that sometimes men must be treated no better than pigs.

But Mr. Job Caudle was not of these men. Marriage to him was not made a necessity. No; for him call it if you will a happy chance-a golden accident. It is, however, enough for us to know that he was married, and was therefore made the recipient of a wife's wisdom. Mrs. Caudle, like Mahomet's dove, continually picked at the good man's ears; and it is a happiness to learn from what he left behind that he had hived all her sayings in his brain; and further, that he employed the mellow evening of his life to put such sayings down, that in due season they might be enshrined in imperishable type.

When Mr. Job Caudle was left in this briery world without his daily guide and nocturnal monitress, he was in the ripe fulness of fifty-two. For three hours at least after he went to bed-such slaves are we to habit --he could not close an eye. His wife still talked at his side. True it was, she was dead and decently interred. His mind-it was a comfort to know it could not wander on this point; this he knew. Nevertheless his wife was with him. The Ghost of her Tongue still talked as in the life;