My amusements solely consisted in collecting literary sticks, picked up exactly in the order and state in which I chanced to find them. They are thin, short, dry, sapless, crooked, headless, and pointless. In the depth of winter, however, a faggot of real French Sticks-although of little intrinsic value may possibly enliven for a few moments an English Fireside. I therefore with great diffidence offer them to my readers, and, hoping the fuel I have collected for them may be deemed worth burning, I beg leave most cordially to wish them.

"A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW

YEAR."

N. B. As the foot-notes in these volumes contain nothing but translations for the assistance of those who do not understand French-of the sentences to which they refer, the general reader may ride over them without notice.

A FAGGOT OF FRENCH STICKS.

THE START.

Ar eleven o'clock of the night of the 29th of April, A.D. 1851, the London train, after two or three rejoicing whistles, reached Dover, and, in a few minutes, I was on the threshold of one-I know not which of that long list of "excellent hotels" whose names, the instant I stepped out of the train, had been simultaneously dinned into my ear by every description of voice, from squeaking treble, apparently just weaned, to a gruff hoarse double-bass, compounded in about equal parts of chronic cough, chronic cold, chronic sore throat, gin, rum, hollands, bitters, brandy, hot water, and filberts.

The narrow outline of the house-lad who, walking backwards, had been elastically alluring me onwards, and the bent head of the sturdy house-porter, who, with my portmanteau on his back and my blue writing-box pendant in his right hand, was following me, so clearly explained my predicament, that, on entering a large coffee-room full of square and oblong mahogany tables, an over-tired waiter, in a white neckcloth, dozing in an arm-chair, no sooner caught a glimpse of the approaching group, than with the alacrity with which Isaac Walton would have twitched at his rod the instant his colored goose-quill bobbed under water, whirling a white napkin under his left arm, he shuffled on his heels towards a large tawdry chandelier, twisted with his right hand three or four gaslights to their maximum flare, and then, with the

1*

jabber of a monkey, repeating to me the surnames of a variety of joints of cold meat, he ended by asking me "What I would please to take?" In reply to his comprehensive question, I desired him to screw back all those lamps which were nearly blinding me, and, as soon as I had returned to the enjoyment of comparative darkness sufficient to be able to look calmly at his jaded face, in three words I withered all his hopes by quietly asking him for the very thing in creation which of all others he would have plucked from my mind—" a bedroom candle."

After turning on his heels and walking like a bankrupt. towards the door, without the addition or subtraction of a single letter, he telegraphically repeated my words; and accordingly in less than a minute a very ordinary sort of a chambermaid, with a face and brass candlestick shining at each other, conducted me up two or three steps, then up about half a dozen more-of the exact number in both instances she carefully admonished me—then along a carpeted passage that sounded hollow as I trod upon it, then sharp to the left, and eventually, after all this magnificent peroration, into a very little room, almost entirely occupied by a large family four-post bed, the convex appearance of which corroborated what was verbally explained to me-that the feathers were uppermost. As soon as my conductress had deposited her candle on a little table, which, excepting a tiny washingstand in the corner, was the only companion in the way of furniture the bed had in the room, she wished me good night; in reply to which I asked her to promise me most faithfully that I should be called in time to "cross" by the first packet. I will go and put it down on the slate, Sir !" she replied; and as she seemed to have implicit confidence as to the result, I soon divested my mind and its body of all unnecessary incumbrances, and, in a few minutes, lost to the world and to myself, I sank into oblivion and feathers.

I had been dead and buried for an unknown period, when I was gradually and rather uncomfortably awaked by the repetition of an unpleasant noise, which, on opening my ears and eyes, I discovered to be the pronunciation at intervals, from the mouth of a short, thin, pale, wiry young man, on whose pensive face, jacket, and trowsers were various little spots of blacking, of the words "Four o'clock, Sir !"