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"Call the next Day."

Waal," replied he, 'certainly it's a

baw."

Yaas," said I, "it's a baw;" for, don't you see, I thought if I spoke the language of the natives I might get redress.

Ah, you showed it to one of the gentlemen here?"

"Yaas," said I, pointing out his signature, "and he signed it, and said it was all right." Ah!" he replied, "I suppose he was very much engaged?"

Yaas," said I, "he was doing nothing; and," I added, "there were two other gentlemen helping him." Mind you, we were quite unmoved throughout the dialogue.

“Waal,” said he, "you must take it back.” Having said this, and scrawled over it with a pencil an assertion that it was all right, he finished buttoning his gloves, and walked off. Then I found out my weary friend at the mouth of the canvas river again, and depositing the unlucky nomination in his hand, received directions to call the next day. "It's too late now," was the answer, "come here to-morrow."

That I can't," I replied; "I'm going out of town, and shall not be able to come for a week. Will it be ready in a week?”

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Yes," said he, sticking it into a pigeonhole, where I firmly believe it is now untouched, while I am sitting in a friend's library a hundred and fifty miles away from town; but when I go back, I intend to take lodgings somewhere near the Strand, and, if possible, see the end of the matter.

Prodigious! as Dominie Sampson said; the deed has been stamped at last. Probably, it took less than a quarter of a minute to do it; but it was done, and my attitude of expectancy and complaint is no longer justifiable. Messrs. Stickfast & Grabfee laughed, through their clerk, when I told them the history of the process, and said that even they never got a deed stamped without having to send twice. But why, we ask, are not stamps sold? Why could not I have bought a thirty-shilling one, and, sticking it on the thing with a lick and a pat, have relieved the expectation of my friend C at once, though it would have lost me three days' sport in the preserves of Somerset House?

( 332 )

SHORT CUTS.

ID you ever know a path across a level field to be straight, when formed by the feet of wayfarers alone? There is the opposite stile which you seek, there is nothing to turn you to the right hand or to the left but your own swerving fancy; and that makes the field-path crooked, invariably. It seems as if no one could walk straight alone, nor indeed correct himself, once for all, when wrong. The moment he becomes conscious of a deviation from the true track, he leaves it again in the other direction. When the object to be reached is obvious, corrections are more frequently repeated.. So it comes to pass that the fresh-stamped path over the mould is never straight, but a calendar of successive mistakes. Thus difficult is it to take the shortest cut. None but a ploughman can do so; and he can do little or nothing, except it be after long years of patient experience. Walking the other day for some miles

Through Fields.

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through fields, in which the track from gate to gate had been marked out by the passengers themselves, and lay always crooked on the ground, I fell into such an entanglement of thought about short cuts that, like as with a tune which you can get rid of only by humming it again and again, I found myself putting some of them on paper when I came home. And if the great excuse for an essay or soliloquy is its power of arousing reflections which the reader accepts as his own, perhaps my familiar reverie may not be uttered without some such effect.

Short cuts let me first beg the privilege of using them now, and whenever I see a fresh thought, make straight for it, though I may risk a blunder, and leave the correct progress of meditation.

Somebody said once that "there was no royal road to geometry," and that neat reproof to a vulgar king has been caught up by so many, that no doubt there is a great principle involved in the saying. The principle is, that money will not buy genius; that the splendour of rank does not necessarily make the brain shine. But the philosopher's rebuke is telling only on the assumption that regal power is external alone.

I hold it as certain that there is a royal road to most ends, if the traveller be a born king. Every successful short cut is made by a regal mind. Some object has been hitherto approached only by tedious pains. The wise and the weak, alike, labour and wait. All at once the labyrinth in whose turns they are creeping is burst through, and one man's force of brain and will destroys the inviolable hedge. Others follow over the gap; his short cut becomes in a common way but a royal road, for it was a king who first found it

out.

Indeed, every true leader and ruler of mankind guides them thus. No nation will ever advance far at the word of command. The national wit stagnates, the schools hang on hand. The tutors teach the old formulas. The pupils thumb the old books. Everything is done, and must be done, with true conservative pains: no princely patronage can quicken the pace or the thought of the workers.

But all at once some mighty mind makes a short cut; invents a steam-engine, say, and the whole nation, prince and all, masters and scholars, tutors and taught, follow in the wake of the new guide.