In short each anxious Kangaroo Discuss’d the matter through and through; By day they seem’d to get no nearer, ’Twas posing quite-- And in the night Of course they saw their way no clearer! At last thus musing on their knees-- Or hinder elbows if you please-- It came--no thought was ever brighter! In weighing every why and whether, They jump’d upon it both together-- “Let’s make the imp a _short-hand writer_!” MORAL. I wish all human parents so Would argue what their sons are fit for; Some would-be critics that I know Would be in trades they have more wit for. LITERARY REMINISCENCES. No. II. TO do justice to the climate of “stout and original Scotland,” it promised to act kindly by the constitution committed to its care. The air evidently agreed with the natives; and auld Robin Grays and John Andersons were plenty as blackberries, and Auld Lang Syne himself seemed to walk, bonneted, amongst these patriarchal figures in the likeness of an old man covered with a mantle. The effect on myself was rather curious--for I seemed to have come amongst a generation that scarcely belonged to my era; mature spinsters, waning bachelors, very motherly matrons, and experienced fathers, that I should have set down as uncles and aunts, called themselves my cousins; reverend personages, apparently grandfathers and grandmothers, were simply great uncles and aunts: and finally I enjoyed an interview with a relative oftener heard of traditionally, than encountered in the body--a great-great grandmother--still a tall woman and a tolerable pedestrian, going indeed down the hill, but with the wheel well locked. It was like coming amongst the Struldbrugs; and truly, for any knowledge to the contrary, many of these Old Mortalities are still living, enjoying their sneeshing, their toddy, their cracks, and particular reminiscences. The very phrase of being “Scotch’d, but not killed,” seems to refer to this Caledonian tenacity of life, of which the well-known Walking Stewart was an example: he was an annuitant in the County-office, and as the actuaries would say, died very hard. It must be difficult for the teatotallers to reconcile this longevity with the imputed enormous consumption of ardent spirits beyond the Tweed. Scotia, according to the evidence of Mr. Buckingham’s committee, is an especially drouthie bodie, who drinks whiskey at christenings, and at buryings, and on all possible occasions besides. Her sons drink not by the hour or by the day, but by the week,--witness Souter Johnny:-- “Tam lo’ed him like a vera brither, They had been fou for weeks thegither.”