I told her my exact age. "Humph!" quoth she, as if she rather doubted my word, "two years younger nor me! you look a great deal older nor that." After a long pause, and another searching gaze, "Do you call those teeth your own?" "Yes," said I, laughing; for I could retain my gravity no longer; "in the very truest sense of the word they are mine, as God gave them to me." "You luckier than your neighbours," said she. "But airn't you greatly troubled with headaches?" "No," said I, rather startled at this fresh interrogatory. "My!" exclaimed she, "I thought you must be, your eyes are so sunk in your head. Well, well, so you are Mrs. M--- of Belleville, the woman that writes. You are but a humly body after all." While this curious colloquy was going on, my poor Irish friend sat on thorns, and tried, by throwing in a little judicious blarney, to soften the thrusts of the home truths to which he had unwittingly exposed me. Between every pause in the conversation, he broke in with--"I am sure Mrs. M--- is a fine-looking woman--a very young-looking woman for her age. Any person might know at a glance that those teeth were her own. They look too natural to be false." Now, I am certain that the poor little woman never meant to wound my feelings, nor give me offence. She literally spoke her thoughts, and I was too much amused with the whole scene to feel the least irritated by her honest bluntness. She expected to find in an author something quite out of the common way, and I did not come up at all to her expectations. Her opinion of me was not more absurd than the remarks of two ladies who, after calling upon me for the first time, communicated the result of their observations to a mutual friend. "We have seen Mrs. M---, and we were so surprised to find her just like other people!" "What did you expect to see in her?" "Oh, something very different. We were very much disappointed." "That she was not sitting upon her head," said my friend, smiling; "I like Mrs. M---, because she is in every respect like other people; and I should not have taken her for a blue-stocking at all." The sin of authorship meets with little toleration in a new country. Several persons of this class, finding few minds that could sympathise with them, and enter into their literary pursuits, have yielded to despondency, or fallen victims to that insidious enemy of souls, _Canadian whisky_. Such a spirit was the unfortunate Dr. Huskins, late of Frankfort on the river Trent. The fate of this gentleman, who was a learned and accomplished man of genius, left a very sad impression on my mind. Like too many of that highly-gifted, but unhappy fraternity, he struggled through his brief life, overwhelmed with the weight of undeserved calumny, and his peace of mind embittered with the most galling neglect and poverty.