the cup; for I felt almost afraid to move anything, lest I should disturb the silence which lay on all around, like a spell. The last stroke had hardly died away, when the solitary rattle of a pair of wheels came up the road, and stopped at the door of my lodging.

"That's the car, sir," said the servant, as she quietly laid the coffee-pot down. She spoke in a soft undertone, quite unlike the voice with which she cleaved through the busy sounds that fill the air of noonday. She spoke as if the silence was peopled with something unearthly, which she was afraid to waken. * * * A knock came to the door. It was the driver. I took a parting gulph of the coffee, whipped my cape over my shoulders, donned a white hat, and went out, followed by the terrier, "Trick," whose barking rang loud and clear all over the town; and seemed to fill the unoccupied ear of morning with an untimely activity.

It was "a nipping and an eager air," and I was cold. The driver looked very cold, for he seemed to shrink into the woollen tie which swathed his throat, and his pinched nose was red and raw; and the whip in his hand gave a shiver now and then, as if it needed a drop of something warm to waken it up to the business of the day. The car, too, had a chill and shrivelled appearance—it was evidently much less than it would have been at noontide; and the horse looked as if it had been sleeping in a windy field all night, with the gate open. The very pavement was starved, and still-like an old woman, waiting for relief at the door of a parish office, on a wintry day. The streets, the houses, the pale blue sky, the waning moon, and the world altogether, seemed as if it had just stepped out of a cold bath, and was waiting to be rubbed down with a rough towel. I heard the teeth of the morning chattering in its head. The moan of the sea had a shiver in it; and old Dan, who was usually so genial, sat upon the car as stiff as a mummy, three thousand years old. Nothing on earth seemed to have much

life in it that morning, except the Skye terrier, and even that little bunch of indestructible animation, whose progenitors had wintered with the hawk and fox, far away in the cold mountains of the north, looked as if it had been begotten by an icicle out of a snowdrift. I shrunk up, as I drew my cape about me, and looked around; but I was, nevertheless, pleased at heart; for it was, indeed, a lovely morning-of the kind. None of us had much to say. It was not only too chill, and too soon in the day, but there was something in the fine repose of the scene that seemed to warn us not to disturb its * * * beauty by any impertinent gabble. As the driver sat upon his seat, gazing, with petrified eyes, at his starved horse-which stood as still as if every hair of its tail was cut in stone-he looked as if the elements of which he was composed had been put together in a cold state, and would certainly fall asunder if ever that drab coat of his came unbuttoned. Dan was "hutched" into the smallest possible compass, in one corner of the car. His old limbs had crept close together to keep one another warm. He was wrapt in a strong blue overcoat; and he had a thick muffler round his neck, and a heavy rug tucked in about his legs. He bade me "Good morning;" and we shook hands-like two marble statues saluting. And then his old eyes tried to look lively from under the sheltering bushes of grey hair; beneath which they seemed to have crept as far as possible out of the cold. But it was no use. Nature would not be cajoled; and the old man's unthawed constitution entered a quiet protest against doing any thing warm at such a chill and untimely hour. His heart had not taken down its shutters for the day; and even the tone of his voice had a cold sound—like a frosty wind whistling through leafless thorns. Without preamble, we lapsed into a dead silence; and when I got up to my seat, I felt as stiff as a pair of rusty compasses, which had been left in the rain for a week. The petrified driver woke up his frozen horse with a touch of the starved whip. The

* * *

were

chill car started; and away we went out at the end of the cold town, like three dead fish, packed up in ice, for a distant market. The rattle of the wheels sounded strange with all that world of silence to play in; and the old car seemed ashamed of the noise it was making-like a man startled by the din of his own footsteps in the stillness of an empty church. In that quiet morning hour, many a trifling thing caught the eye, which would have been passed unobserved when the senses crowded with the importunate activities of noonday ;— the bits of stone on the road, knocked hither and thither by horses' feet; the little pools of water left by the rain; the piece of torn newspaper, which I saw "Trick" worrying with such wild delight, as it drifted about in the wind, the day before; the driblets of hay, where carts had stopped; the sugary dust, and fragments of packthread, and tea paper, and raisin-stalks, and mealy sweepings, in front of the grocer's shop; the mussel-shells, thrown out from cottage doors, after last night's supper; the broken pipe, dropped by a lounging carter; and the fag-end of a cigar, flung away by some careless swell as he sauntered along; the crushed mouse, run over by a cart-wheel; the dead leaves, trailing wierdly in the wind; the bits of turf, and splinters of bog-fir, where a load of firing had been emptied; the picked fish-fins; aye, even the very wheel-ruts, and prints of horses' feet upon the road-which garish noon would have drowned in obscurity-had now a chance of asserting their presence; and each little pebble seemed to look up, and say, σε Now, don't you see me? Am I not something, also? Ask me questions; and I can put you to the riddle of the universe; for I am older than you dream of."

As that grey morning dawned upon the unawakened world, our cold car rattled out at the end of the cold town; and the sound filled all the silent street-like a pebble rolling in an empty barrel. We passed "Jolly Ned's" public, "where drouthy neebors meet;" we passed

the whitewashed house, with the verandah in front, where the old gentleman lives who owns the fishery; we passed the little white cottage, where the washerwoman lives; we passed the house that is "To Let," at ten pounds a year; and the cottage where the smiling car-man dwells, who always "laves it to your honour;" we passed the house where the windows are so thronged with pretty faces, in the day-time, that they look like beds of flowers; and we passed the old iron pump, where bare-footed lasses stand in tattling clusters, waiting their turns to get water; and then the houses began to trickle away in twos and threes, till we came to the sandy road, which leads down to "The Long Strand." A few yards farther on, we passed the pretty Catholic chapel, with its school, and priest's house, in enclosed ground; and a little beyond that, the tiny gasworks,-the last building of all,-which seemed to hang on the rest, like a drop at the cold noseend of the town. And now we were out among the open country green.

Our way led between low hedge-rows; and sea and land lay open to view; except that a straggling ridge of grassy knolls shut from sight the "Long Strand," which is such a fine wandering ground for the people of the town. There was a strange charm upon all the scene that morning. The moon was paling her soft radiance before the coming light of day, as she set beyond the wide sea; and the murmur of the tide, which came over the sand-hills, harmonised well with the contemplative beauty of that spell-bound dawn.

MY LODGING BY THE SEA.

thirst.

A little lowly hermitage it was.

SPENSER.

HE summer sky had been cloudless for weeks. The green pastures lay parching in the sun, and shallow rivers were beginning to pant with The pavements of the city were hot under foot, and here and there a butterfly came, like a wingéd flower, fluttering among the mazy streets, which were doomed to be the ribs of death to that silken straggler from the fields. The markets were gay with fruits and flowers. There was great traffic in posies for button-holes; and from morning till night the hawker's cry, in little back streets, was "Sallet, oh!" Dead walls were bright with news of tempting trips into the green country; and rosy hope, in many a jaded mind, began to "bid the distant scenes of pleasure hail!"

I was getting tired of city life; and, as the time drew near that set me at liberty for a little while, my thoughts began to wander again towards the shores of the sea. I think there must be some touch of the old Scandinavian rover in my nature; for the witchery of the wild ocean had laid hold of me long before I set eyes upon its heaving