a lady in weeds for her husband who came drooping like a willow to Nollekens, the sculptor, desiring a monument, and declaring that she did not care what money was expended on the memory of one she loved so. "Do what you please, but, oh, do it quickly!" were her parting orders. Nollekens went to work, made the design, finished the model, and began to look for a block of marble to carve it from, when in dropped the lady; she had been absent some three months. "Poor soul," said the sculptor, when she was announced, "I thought she would come soon, but I am ready." The lady came light of foot, and lighter of look. "Ah, how do you do, Mr. Nollekens? Well, you have not commenced the model?" "Ay, but I have, though," returned the sculptor, "and there it stands, finished!" "There it is, indeed," sighed the lady, throwing herself into a chair; they looked at each other for a minute's space or so--she spoke first; "These, my good friend, are, I know, early days for this little change,"--she looked at her dress, from which the early profusion of crape had disappeared,--"but since I saw you, I have met with an old Roman acquaintance of yours who has made me an offer, and I don't know how he would like to see in our church a monument of such expense to my late husband. Indeed, on second thought, it would be considered quite enough if I got our mason to put up a mural tablet, and that, you know, he can cut very prettily." "My charge, madam, for the model," said the sculptor, "is one hundred guineas." "Enormous! enormous!" said the lady, but drew out her purse, and paid it. The mutability of human nature! Change, change is the rule. Flaxman, when he was in Rome, lived at a sort of chocolate house kept by three girls who were so elegant as to be called "the Graces." They lived to be so old that they were called "the Furies." A distinguished painter has said, that often while you are looking at a face, and though you perceive no difference in the features, yet you find they have undergone a total alteration of expression. "I have seen several pictures of Garrick," said Macaulay, "none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished." "I wish the world, James," said Christopher North to the Ettrick Shepherd, "would stand still for some dozen years--till I am at rest. It seems as if the very earth itself were undergoing a vital change. Nothing is unalterable, except the heaven above my head, and even it, James, is hardly, methinks, at times, the same as in former days or nights. There is not much difference in the clouds, James, but the blue sky, I must confess, is not quite so very blue as it was sixty years since; and the sun, although still a glorious luminary, has lost a leetle--of his lustre." Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne, says he saw a cock-bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colors.