He took well, and pulled ’em in most excellent for nine weeks. At the expiration of that period, when his Ed was a sight, he expressed one evening, the last company havin been turned out, and the doors shut, a wish to have a little music. “Mr. Chops,” I said (I never dropped the “Mr.” with him; the world might do it, but not me),--“Mr. Chops, are you sure as you are in a state of mind and body to sit upon the organ?” His answer was this: “Toby, when next met with on the tramp, I forgive her and the Indian. And I am.” It was with fear and tremblin that I began to turn the handle; but he sat like a lamb. It will be my belief to my dying day, that I see his Ed expand as he sat; you may therefore judge how great his thoughts was. He sat out all the changes, and then he come off. “Toby,” he says with a quiet smile, “the little man will now walk three times round the Cairawan, and then retire behind the curtain.” When we called him in the mornin we found he had gone into much better society than mine or Pall Mall’s. I give Mr. Chops as comfortable a funeral as lay in my power, followed myself as chief, and had the George the Fourth canvas carried first, in the form of a banner. But the house was so dismal afterwards, that I give it up, and took to the wan again. [Illustration: text decoration] [Illustration: text decoration] WAKEFIELD. BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man--let us call him Wakefield--who absented himself for a long time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very uncommon, nor--without a proper distinction of circumstances--to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance, on record, of marital delinquency; and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in London. The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upward of twenty years. During that period he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield. And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity,--when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory, and his wife, long, long ago, resigned to her autumnal widowhood,--he entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse till death.