against catching cold; but the last thing the brandy bottle had done had been to stay at home in the cupboard. Mr. Hodges, therefore, walked off to the Green Man for his health’s sake; and Master Carnaby sneaked off, nobody knew where, for the sake of blackberries;--while the Nursemaid, for the sake of society, took a romantic walk with the two twins, and a strange footman. Gipsies are a wandering race, and all the performers topped their parts; the very horse roamed away like a horse that had neither parish nor settlement: and Mr. Carnaby would have gone roaming after him, if his Wife and Daughter had not hung round his neck and made him swear not to leave ’em till the others returned, which was afterwards softened down to taking a little walk, provided he didn’t go out of sight and hearing. In the mean time Mrs. and Miss C---- laid the cloth, and began to review the eatables, not without lamenting over the smash of the pigeon pie; and when they came to plan their second course they found that the chief remove, a cold round of beef, had been pinned on the way down by a favourite bull-dog, that Master Carnaby had smuggled into the party. Luckily for the dog, he had also gone roving, with the whole forest before him, as naturally as if he had belonged to Bampfylde Moore Carew, the King of the Gipsies. [Illustration: COIL AND RECOIL.] [Illustration: DEADLY NIGHTSHADE.] Mrs. Carnaby was one of those characters emphatically called fidgets; she never rested till each individual came back, and she never rested when they did. Mr. C. was the first to return, and not in the first of tempers. He had been done out of his long-anticipated rural walk by setting his foot, before he had gone a hundred yards, on a yard of snake, and it had frightened him so that Mrs. Carnaby expected “it would turn his whole mash of blood, and give him the yellow jaundice.” Mr. Hodges came in second, but to the impatient eye of Miss C. certainly did not proceed from the Green Man with the straightness of a bullet from a rifle. Master Carnaby was a good third, for he had been well horse-whipped, just as he had got three little red blackberries and five thorns in his fingers, by a gentleman who did not approve of his trespassing upon his grounds. Boxer the bull-dog was fourth; he came back on three-legs, with his brindle well peppered with number six by the gamekeeper, to cure him of worrying park rabbits. In fact, poor Boxer, as Mrs. C. exclaimed, “was bleeding like a pig,” and the grateful animal acknowledged her compassionate notice by going and rubbing his shot hide against her shot silk, in return for which he got a blow quite hard enough to shiver the stick of something between a parasol and an umbrella. As for the nurse-maid and the twins they did not return for an hour, to the infinite horror of the mother; but just as they were all sitting down to dinner Betsey appeared with her charge, walked off their feet, with their “pretty mouths all besmeared”