the jostling, interfering, and elbowing, that
for his own part, he tells us, being old and
small, he received more than a score of full
butt rencounters with dames in full sweep,
and had to admire the greater experience
with which the yet more ancient Duke of
Queensbery piloted his perilous way. Of the
accommodation in other respects, he also
enables us to judge. He made fifteen vain
attempts to get a dish of tea; and when
served at last, it was in a slovenly manner,
on a dirty tea-stand. Of all the commoner
tea resorts he had already had experience;
—he knew Bagnigge Wells, White Conduit
House was not strange to him, nor was he
unfamiliar with the Dog and Duck;—but
never, in the humblest of such places of
public resort, had he seen the company
treated with so little respect by servants, as
here. With Ranelagh, whose vacation it
pretended to supply, it was not in that respect
comparable; Vauxhall was a thousand times
more agreeable; and taking himself off at the
early hour of twelve, it was with no small
content Mr. Curwen found himself once more
safe in his own lodgings.

And now, week had crept on after week,
month after month, and he was in the second
year of his exile. The war that had driven
him here was raging more furiously than ever;
his wife Abigail, who had refused to accompany
him on his flight, had been obliged to
pay ten pounds in Salem to find a man for
the American army in his stead; George
Washington was proclaimed Lord Protector
of the thirteen independent States; the hope,
which even Jefferson once entertained, that
England and her Colonies might have been
a free and a great people together, was for
ever gone; and nothing remained for such as
held the ex-judge's moderate opinions but
to prepare for a lengthened exile. Exactly
twelve months were passed since he landed
at Dover, and here was a letter just come
from a friend at Salem—"filled with American
fancies," Heaven help them! Nothing was
dwelt upon in it but their power, strength,
grandeur, and prowess, by land and sea; their
policy, patriotism, industry; their progress in
the useful arts, and their fixed determination to
withstand the attacks of tyranny—"etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera," adds Mr. Curwen,
impatient of his correspondent's extravagance.
For he feels, alas! that too soon, to their
sorrow, these fanciful notions, like Ephraim's
goodness, will "vanish as the morning cloud
and early dew" into the land whither all such
fatal delusions sooner or later pass. But
meanwhile he may not shrink from the
conclusion such letters put before him. He
must no longer hope to measure his residence
in England by the probabilities of weeks or
months, but by the sad certainty of years.

London, then, can be no place for his
continued abode. It is too expensive for the
narrow means to which the necessities attendant
on his flight restrict him. He must visit
some of the leading country towns to ascertain
whether without the cost of London, yet
not wholly apart from the cultivated society
to which he has been accustomed, his mode of
life may be able to adapt itself to his altered
circumstances. And perhaps, at some early
day, the reader will not object to accompany
him on this proposed ramble through the
leading towns of Old England, and mark how
little or how much they may still retain of
what their visitor from New England observed
in them Seventy-Eight Years Ago.

         FISHER'S GHOST.

IN the colony of New South Wales, at
place called Penrith, distant from Sydney
about thirty-seven miles, lived a farmer named
Fisher. He had been, originally, transported,
but had become free by servitude. Unceasing
toil, and great steadiness of character, had
acquired for him a considerable property, for a
person in his station of life. His lands and
stock were not worth less than four thousand
pounds. He was unmarried, and was about
forty-five years old.

Suddenly Fisher disappeared; and one of his
neighbours—a man named Smith—gave out
that he had gone to England, but would
return in two or three years. Smith produced
a document, purporting to be executed
by Fisher; and, according to this document,
Fisher had appointed Smith to act as his
agent during his absence. Fisher was a man
of very singular habits and eccentric character,
and his silence about his departure, instead
of creating surprise, was declared to be
"exactly like him."

About six months after Fisher's disappearance,
an old man called Ben Weir, who had a
small farm near Penrith, and who always drove
his own cart to market, was returning from
Sydney, one night, when he beheld, seated on a
rail which bounded the road—Fisher. The
night was very dark, and the distance of the
fence from the middle of the road was, at
least, twelve yards. Weir, nevertheless, saw
Fisher's figure seated on the rail. He pulled
his old mare up, and called out, "Fisher, is
that you?" No answer was returned; but
there, still on the rail, sat the form of the man
with whom he had been on the most intimate
terms. Weir—who was not drunk, though
he had taken several glasses of strong liquor
on the road—jumped off his cart, and
approached the rail. To his surprise, the form
vanished.

"Well," exclaimed old Weir, "this is very
curious, anyhow;" and, breaking several
branches of a sapling so as to mark the exact
spot, he remounted his cart, put his old mare
into a jog-trot, and soon reached his home.

Ben was not likely to keep this vision a
secret from his old woman. All that he had
seen he faithfully related to her.

"Hold your nonsense, Ben!" was old
Betty's reply. "You know you have been a