like their low relatives the bugs, and were caught and crushed without affording the slightest opportunity for sport. It was mortally hot at London-super-Mare, and I left it. Then I tried that English paradise of the west, Clifton; but woe is me! the Downs were so delightful; the prospect so exquisitely lovely; the Avon winding hundreds of feet beneath me, like a silver skein, yet bearing big three-masted ships on its bosom; the rocks and underwood so full of matter for pleasant, lazy cogitation, that I felt the only exertion of which I was capable, to be writing sonnets on the Avon and its sedgy banks, or making lame attempts at pre-Raphaelite sketches in water-colours; or thinking about doing either, which amounts to pretty nearly the same thing. So I came away from Clifton too, and hung out my sign HERE. (It is THERE now: swallows have come and gone, snows have gathered and melted, babies prattle now who were unborn and unthought of then.) Ye shall not know where Here was situated, oh, ye incorrigible Suggesters. No more particular indices of its whereabouts will I give, even to the general public, than that close to my study was a dry skittle-ground, where every day—the hotter the better—I exercised myself with the wooden “cheese” against the seven and a-half pins which were all that the dry skittle-ground could furnish forth towards the ordinary nine; that over-against this gymnastic course was an _étable_, a “shippon,” as they call it in the north, where seven cows gravely ruminated; and that, at the end of a yard crowded with agricultural implements which old Pyne alone could draw, there was a Stye, from which, looking over its palings, “All start, like boys who, unaware, Ranging the woods to find a hare, Come to the mouth of some dark lair: Where, growling low, a fierce old bear Lies amid bones and blood.” Not that any fierce or ancient member of the ursine tribe resided therein; but that it was the residence of a horrific-looking old sow, a dreadful creature, that farrowed unheard-of families of pigs, that lay on her broadside starboard the live-long day, winking her cruel eye, and grunting with a persistent sullenness. The chief swineherd proudly declared her to be “the viciousest beast as ever was,” and hinted darkly that she had killed a Man. The chief swineherd and I were friends. He was my “putter-up” at skittles, and did me the honour to report among the neighbouring peasantry, that “barrin’ the gent as cum here last autumn, and was off his head” (insane, I presume); I was “the very wust hand at knock-’em-downs he ever see.” It is something to be popular in the rural districts; and yet I was not three miles distant from the Regent Circus. * * * * *