A disaster which befel the comedian, Riley, a few years before Mr. Rome was nearly killed at Park-house farm, had a somewhat ludicrous termination. The author of the _Itinerant_, in professionally "starring" through the provinces, remained for some time in the neighbourhood of Furness Abbey, and was engaged to lend his assistance there. The entertainment going off very successfully, a "leetle" too much wine followed on the heels of it. This we presume, for the quantity imbibed by Mr. Riley rendered his perception not quite so clear as it might have been. The way to his quarters was by a footpath through some fields; and jogging along by the dimmish light of an obscured moon, he rambled off the path, and got into a field in which a pugnaciously inclined bull was kept. Snatches of song and other sounds arousing the brute from his night's slumber, he rose and prepared to attack the son of _Thespis_, and gave notice of his intentions by several long drawn "boos," which "boos" Mr. Riley attributed to some one coming after him from the concert. The bull followed up, and got nearer and nearer, with his "boo--boo--boo!" A collision suddenly took place close to the hedge, and in the twinkling of an eye the gentleman was tossed up, and landed secure, but prostrate, on the other side of the hedge, without any harm but a good shaking. Looking up, the astonished comedian exclaimed: "You are neither a musician nor a gentleman, by ----, if you are!" During the eighteenth century, and for thirty or forty years into the present one, farmers, small tradesmen, indeed, most families living in the country, who could afford it, at the fall of the year, salted and stored by as much beef as served the family through the winter. Hence bull baiting--until suppressed--prevailed in most of the northern towns and villages, in the month of November. The weather was then suitable for salting a supply of beef for winter use, and an extra quantity either of bull or heifer beef was quite saleable at that season of the year. An erroneous idea prevailed--had indeed become a settled conviction, that bull beef was much better--should not be used as food, in fact, without the animal had been subject to the usual barbarous baiting.