illuminating the land with the blazing tar-barrels provided for their peculiar use and benefit. Whether it was that aerial gambols on unsaddled and rough-backed broomsticks grew tiresome, or the small profit attending the vocation became smaller, or that all the elderly ladies with moles, and without anything else, were burnt up, we can't pretend to say; but certain it is, the art of witchcraft fell into disrepute. Corking, minikin, and all description of pins, were obliged to be made in the regular way; and cows even departed this world without the honour of the human immolations formerly considered the necessary sacrifice for the loss of their inestimable lives. Since the abovetimes Animal Magnetism and Mesmerism have followed in the wake of what has been; and now, just as despair, already poised upon its outstretched sable wings, was hovering for a brief moment previous to making its final swoop upon the External Doctrine, Peter--our Peter--Peter Laurie--the great, the glorious, the aldermanic Laurie--makes despair, like the Indian Juggler who swallowed himself, become the victim of its own insatiate maw. Our quill trembles as we proceed; it is unequal to the task. Oh, that we could write with the whole goose upon the wondrous merits of the wondrous Peter! We are better. That bumper has restored our nerve. Reader, fancy the gifted Peter seated in the dull dignity of civic magistracy: the court is thronged--a young delinquent blinks like an owl in sunshine 'neath the mighty flashing of his bench-lit eye. His crime, ay, what's his crime? it can't be much--so pale, so thin, so woe-begone! look, too, so tremulous of knee, and redolent of hair! what has he done? Here Roe interprets--"Please your worship, this young man, or tailor, has been assaulting several females with a blue bag and a pair of breeches." _Sir Peter_.--"I don't wonder at it; that man would do anything, I see it in his face, or rather in the back of his head, that's where the expression lies--look at his hair!" The whole court becomes a Cyclops--it has but one eye, and that is fixed upon the tailor's locks. "I say," resumes our Peter, "a man with that head of hair would do anything--pray, sir, do you wish to be taken for a German sausage, or a German student?--they're all the same, sir--speak at once." The faltering fraction denies the student, and repudiates the sausage. _Sir Peter_, still looking at the hair, from which external sign he evidently derived all his information--"You were drunk, sir." "I was," faltered the Samsonian schneider. "I know it, sir--you are fined five shillings, sir--but if you choose to submit to the deprivation of that iniquitous hair, which has brought you here, and which, I repeat, will make you do anything, I will remit the fine."