as to let people evince what they feel, and be more like good, honest folks and chatty companions. If wę sometimes admire maid-servants, instead of their mistresses, it is not our fault, but that of the latter, who will not come abroad. Besides, a real goodhumored maid-servant, with a pretty face, playing over the sward of a green square with her mistress's children, is a very respectable as well as pleasant object. May no inferior of the other sex, under pretence of being a gentleman, deceive her, and render her less so!

A DUSTY DAY.

MONG the "Miseries of Human Life," as a wit pleasantly entitled them, there are few, while the rascal is about it, worse than a great cloud of dust, coming upon you in street or road, you having no means of escape, and the carriages, or flock of sheep, evidently being bent on imparting to you a full share of their besetting horror. The road is too narrow to leave you a choice, even if it had two pathways, which it has not: the day is hot; the wind is whisking. You have come out in stockings, instead of boots; not being aware that you were occasionally to have two feet depth of dust to walk in. Now, now the dust is on you; you are enveloped; you are blind; you have to hold your hat on against the wind: the carriages grind by, or the sheep go pattering along, baaing through all the notes of their poor gamut; perhaps carriages and sheep are together, the latter eschewing the horses' legs, and the shepherd's dog driving against your own, and careering over the woolly backs. Whew! what a dusting! What a blinding! What a whirl! The noise decreases; you'stop; you look about you; gathering up your hat, coat, and faculties, after apologizing to the gentleman against whom you have "lumped,"

and who does not look a bit the happier for your apology. The dust is in your eyes, in your hair, in your shoes and stockings, in your neck-cloth, in your mouth. You grind your teeth in dismay, and find them gritty.

Perhaps another carriage is coming; and you, finding yourself in the middle of the road, and being resolved to be master of at least this inferior horror, turn about towards the wall or paling, and propose to make your way accordingly, and have the dust behind your back, instead of in front; when, lo! you begin sneezing, and cannot see. You have taken involuntary snuff.

Or you suddenly discern a street, down which you can turn, which you do with rapture, thinking to get out of wind and dust at once; when, unfortunately, you discover that the wind is veering to all points of the compass, and that, instead of avoiding the dust, there is a ready-made and intense collection of it, then in the act of being swept into your eyes by the attend- dust-cart!

ants on a

The reader knows what sort of a day we speak of. It is all dusty, the windows are dusty; the people are dusty; the hedges in the roads are horribly dusty, - pitiably,—you think they must feel it; shoes and boots are like a baker's; men on horseback eat and drink dust; coachmen sit screwing up their eyes; the gardener finds his spade slip into the ground, fetching up smooth portions of earth, all made of dust. What is the poor pedestrian to do?

To think of something superior to the dust,whether grave or gay. This is the secret of being

master of any ordinary, and of much extraordinary trouble: bring a better idea upon it, and it is hard if the greater thought does not do something against the less. When we meet with any very unpleasant person, to whose ways we cannot suddenly reconcile ourselves, we think of some delightful friend, perhaps two hundred miles off,- in Northumberland, or in Wales. When dust threatens to blind us, we shut our eyes to the disaster, and contrive to philosophize a bit even then.

"Oh! but it is not worth while doing that.”

Good. If so, there is nothing to do but to be as jovial as the dust itself, and take all gayly. Indeed, this is the philosophy we speak of.

"And yet the dust is annoying too."

Well, take, then, just as much good sense as you require for the occasion. Think of a jest; think of a bit of verse; think of the dog you saw just now, coming out of the pond, and frightening the dandy in his new trousers. But, at all events, don't let your temper be mastered by such a thing as a cloud of dust. It will show, either that you have a very infirm temper indeed, or no ideas in your head.

On all occasions in life, great or small, you may be the worse for them, or the better. You may be made the weaker or the stronger by them; ay, even by so small a thing as a little dust.

When the famous Arbuthnot was getting into his carriage one day, he was beset with dust. What did he do? Damn the dust or the coachman? No: that was not his fashion. He was a wit, and a goodnatured man: so he fell to making an epigram, which

he sent to his friends. It was founded on scientific knowledge, and consisted of the following pleasant exaggeration :

ON A DUSTY DAY.

The dust in smaller particles arose

Than those which fluid bodies do compose.
Contraries in extremes do often meet:

It was so dry, that you might call it wet

Dust at a distance sometimes takes a burnished or tawny aspect in the sun, almost as handsome as the great yellow smoke out of breweries; and you may amuse your fancy with thinking of the clouds that precede armies in the old books of poetry, the spears gleaming out; the noise of the throng growing on the ear; and, at length, horses emerging, and helmets and flags, the Lion of King Richard, or the Lilies of France.

Or you may think of some better and more harmless palm of victory, "not without dust" (palma non sine pulvere),—dust such as Horace says the horsemen of antiquity liked to kick up at the Olympic games; or, as he more elegantly phrases it, "collect" (collegisse juvat; which a punster of our acquaintance translated, "kicking up a dust at college"); or, if you are in a very philosophic vein indeed, you may think of man's derivation from dust, and his return to it; redeeming your thoughts from gloom by the hopes beyond dust, and by the graces which poetry and the affections have shed upon it in this life, like flowers upon graves; lamenting, with the tender Petrarch, that "those eyes of which he spoke so warmly," and