The bereaved owner, meeting the old woman
in the street, deliberately knocked her down,
for having "witched his pigs."

Some time since, a woman applied to me for a
summons against her husband. She said, "My
husband is on his death-bed—the parish doctor
says he cannot live a week; so I told him, as
soon as he was dead, I should marry again:
and he says, so sure as I do, he will come
down the chimney and tear me abroad;
so I wants a summons against him, your
Honour!"

Our sky is propitious, and our orchards
bear much fruit, but the human orchard does
not quite grow or flourish, as one might desire,
in Devonshire.

BOLD ADMIRAL BLAKE.

IT has often excited my wonder that we
have never had, until to-day, for the benefit
of Her Majesty's navy, anything like a
competent and copious account of the life and
career of the renowned Admiral Blake. Little
is really known about him in the navy, or
out of it. In the navy (and I appeal to my
old messmates in the Bustard, two obstacles
interfere with his due reputation. One of
these is the glory of our latest batch of heroes
—the Nelsons and Collingwoods—which is too
brilliant for it to be easy to see back through
it. The other obstacle is, that the times
are so very different. Benbow (who
represents the period between Blake and Nelson)
is as dead as the Dodo, and now enjoys a
semi-facetious reputation, something like
that of his pig-tail. And still more is it
difficult to picture to one's self the old Puritan
officers and the old sailors of the Civil War
times. It is particularly difficult to do so in
a midshipman's mess, with a cask of Madeira
in the corner; or when leaning against the
orange-coloured bulwarks of a dandy brig,
you listen to the polka which is being played
in the captain's cabin, by that captain himself,
the Honourable Alfred de la Bayliffe, son of
Earl Gruntis. You find your notions of the
Blake period particularly vague, I say, when
you are dodging off the town of Naples,
waiting for De la Bayliffe's cousin the duke,
who is about to take a passage in the Patchouli
with you to Sicily. Nor can you readily
fancy a grand, grim, worn-out old admiral,
with scurvy devouring him, when you pass
the admiral's house at Malta, and reflect on
the amount of his "table-money." Nevertheless,
the very "swellest " uniforms of this
period have English hearts under them still,
and will be glad to hear once again of an
admiral of the "old school." We purpose,
therefore, to give a sketch (merely in
watercolours) of the life and story of the "Puritan
Sea-King," dipping our pencil frequently into
the tints supplied by Mr. Hepworth Dixon,
in his recently published life of the good old
admiral. Blake, as we shall see, was
something more than a mere great captain, either
by land or sea, and indicated repeatedly the
capability of being anything that was wanted
of him—being a scholar, theologian, adviser
of his friends and neighbours, according as
his duty seemed to dictate; and having,
especially, a faculty for waiting, which murk
the man who ripens and "bides," and of whom
anything may with confidence be expected in
an easy, natural way, at a future period.

ROBERT BLAKE was the eldest son of
Humphrey Blake, gentleman by birth, and
merchant by profession, and Sara Williams, a
lady of good descent; and was born in Bridgewater,
in August, 1599—"Cromwell's year."
There were several children, and Blake senior
was not a particularly prosperous man; but
Robert, having been duly brought up at
the town's grammar-school, proceeded at
sixteen years of age to the University of
Oxford. He was of highly intellectual promise,
from his youth upwards, and with a decided
turn for reading, which his father naturally
hoped high things from. As he lived his youth
in a comfortable, honourable old house, his
mind fed by old traditions of past times in
England, and paternal anecdotes of the
wonders of foreign lands, both elements to feed
the natural wonder of a fine-minded youngster,
Blake's youth was surely a happy one. The
house in which he lived, it seems, still exists,
in a venerable and beautiful age, and you see
the site of the two acres of garden which
belonged to it, and in which Robert played as
a boy, and afterwards paced about seriously
enough as a man. As a boy, one does not,
however, picture him as very particularly
vivacious; but, though genial enough,
composed, thoughtful, and mild. The fine dark
eyes, which his portrait shows, have much
capability of tender and inquiring softness,
and help us to fancy him listening to Father
Humphrey's stories of his mercantile cruises in
his vessel with curiosity tempered by awe.
The world round him was so wonderful, and
all so holy to young Blake, as he grew into
Puritanism; and here was Father Humphrey
with stories about new, far-off wonders and
beauties—of a Spain where Cervantes was
still alive; of the dusky pirates of Africa
dashing about the Mediterranean; of the
stern, mailed knights of Malta; and the slave-
markets of the South.

Blake went to college, and there studied
hard—whether by way of recreation, also
indulging in "stealing of swans," is doubtful
—and to the present writer highly improbable.
Blake ripened into scholarship, and it seems,
always retained a certain turn for a literary
species of sarcasm—delighting to launch a
quotation from Horace and Juvenal as heartily
as a shot, when it seemed the proper wenpon.
He failed in his contest for a scholarship at
Christ Church, but stuck to the College of
Wadham, where they still show his portrait.
In the interim, his father's prospects had
been darkening; Robert resolved to try to