little scoundrel to impose upon us in this manner?” Moses turned round, and with an arch look, replied, “Princh be d--d! I vash no Princh; I vash acting, like you. Your troop vash Lords and Ladies last night; and to-night dey vil be Kings, Prinches, and Emperors! I vash hum pugs, you vash humpugs, all vash humpugs!” There is a fair,--an extraordinary one,--the holding of which depends not on the caprice of magisterial wiggery. Jack Frost--a bold fellow! for he has taken Marlborough and Wellington by the nose--twice or thrice in a century proclaims his fair. No sooner is the joyful tidings bruited abroad, than the dutiful sons and daughters of Old Father Thames flock to his paternal bosom, which, being icy cold, they warm by roasting an ox upon it, and then transfer to its glassy surface the turmoil, traffic, and monstrosities of dry land. Evelyn has given an interesting description of Frost Fair in 1683-4. This amusing chronicler of passing events possessed more than Athenian curiosity. He entered the penetralia of the court of King Charles the Second; and while he whispered in his closet pathetic Jeremiads over its immorality, he shocked his averted vision day after day with its impurities--still peeping! still praying! For all and sundry of the merry Monarch's “misses,” and for poor _Nelly_ (by far the best of them) in particular, he expressed a becoming horror in his private meditations; yet his outward bearing towards them indicated no such compunctious visitings. He was an excellent tactician. He crept into the privy councils of the regicides, and, _mirabile dictu!_ retired from the enemy's camp in a whole skin; and while fortunes were being confiscated, and heads were falling on all sides, he kept his own snug in his pocket, and erect on his shoulders. Monarchy, Anarchy, High Church, Low Church, No Church, Catholicism, Anything-ism, Every-thing-ism.! plain John (he declined a baronetcy) passed over the red-hot ploughshares of political and religious persecution unsinged. And we rejoice at his good luck; for whether he treat of London's great Plague or Fire, the liaisons of his “kind master” King Charles the Second, the naughtiness of Nelly and her nymphs, or the ludicrous outbreaks of Southwark, St. Bartholomew, and Frost Fairs, he is a delightful, gentlemanly old gossiper! On the 1st of January 1683-4, the cold was so intense, that booths (a novel spectacle) were erected on the Thames, and Jack Frost proclaimed his earliest recorded fair. “I went crosse the Thames,” says Evelyn, January 9, 1683-4, “on the ice, which now became so thick as to bear not only streetes of boothes, in which they roasted meate, and had divers shops of wares, quite acrosse as in a towne, but coaches, carts, and horses passed over. So I went from Westminster Stay res to Lambeth, and din'd with the Archbishop. I walked over the ice (after dinner) from Lambeth Stayres to the Horseferry.”