on a bleak heath, and taking a Pisgah view of a knacker's-yard at Cow Cross, that you remember in Bewick's splendid, but unfinished woodcut, "Waiting for Death." Small good-only needless aggravation of their sorrows-would it have been to lash those woe-begone ones. So the postilion confined himself to flourishing the whip gaily and incessantly, as the scarlet post-wagen rattled over Frankfort's stony streets, brandishing the stock above his head, making the lash gyrate in concentric circles-(and in somewhat unpleasant proximity to the faces of the outside passengers) and producing a most astounding series of cracking reverberations. The stout gentleman compared them to fireworks, and affected to be able to distinguish between catharine-wheels and Roman candles; the man with the iron chest shamelessly avowed himself to be in an agony of terror; and the slim gentleman (who was in the box-seat-the others were behind) prudently pulled his hat over his brow, and shielded his face with his Bradshaw's Foreign Guide.

"He'll cut my eye out to a certainty," he remarked, somewhat nervously, "I wish, before I'd left, that I'd taken out a policy in the Accidental Death Insurance Company. They gave a pig-jobber the other day ten pounds. as compensation for falling out of a gig, and a civil engineer fifty for breaking his shins over a coalscuttle."

"How would the law affect us if we were to throw the postilion off the box?" the stout gentleman inquired. "There are precedents for such a proceeding. Don't you recollect the case reported in-; well, it doesn't matter; I haven't my law library with me. A sailor had taken an outside back place in a mail-coach, and sat beside the guard, who fancied himself a dab at the French horn, and played a selection of popular airs without cessation all the way from the Bull and Mouth to Highgate Archway. The sailor had no ear,

Sud

hated music, and repeatedly entreated the scarletcoated functionary to desist. Guard laughed, and played 'All round my hat' louder than ever. denly there was a dead silence. Coachman, surprised at the dejection of his musical coadjutor, turned round in his box, and, to his horror and amazement, saw his friend's seat in the rumble vacant. Where's the guard?' he cried to the sailor. 'Do you mean that confounded trumpeter?' he made reply, cutting a fresh quid; I chucked him overboard! What if we were to serve the guard in like manner? But they have strange notions of law abroad, and it might be high treason to chuck a postilion overboard."

"You had better take care as to what you are about in a 'free and imperial city,'" observed the M. I. C., with grim significance. "They're the most absolute tyrants in the world; and the Syndic of the Senate is a greater autocrat than the King of Dahomey. If you object to an item in an hotel bill, I believe the Senate banishes you from the city for ever; refusing to marry a tobacconist's stout daughter, if she condescends to make eyes at you from the parlour-window, is imprisonment for life in the dungeons beneath the level of the Maine; smoking other than Frankfort manufactured cigars is fifty thalers fine; and neglecting to purchase fifths in the Frankfort lottery is excommunication.'

"You're always bothering about that Frankfort lottery; I think you're an agent for it," the slim gentleman retorted, peevishly. "Hang that whip!" he exclaimed, in painful continuation; "there it is again. One might fancy we were lightning conductors."

It was not un

But the postilion was a wary man. advisedly that I imputed philosophy to him. Rapidly as the whip gyrated, and loud as were its smackings, it did harm neither to man nor beast. It was full of sound and fury; but it signified nothing beyond a

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continuous vaunt of the speed of the horses, the agility of the postilion, and what a first-rate turn-out the Frankfurter-Hombourg Post-Wagen was altogether. It was an invitation for bearded workmen and plump damsels to come to the casements, and cry "Ho! the brave equipage! Ho! the swift horses! Ho! the gallant postilion! May the high, well-born British lords be generous unto him, and give him much trinkgeld!"

I call him postilion, when, lo! he was a coachman, for he sat on the box, and held the long reinshempen, pieced with frayed worsted, and bits of ragged chain. And he was a postilion too; at least his costume seemed common in these parts to those who rode, as well as to those who drove post-horses. A very brave make-up he had now, shiny hat of cuir bouilli, "boiled leather" they call oilskin abroad; tremendous cockade with the free imperial city's colours: no ribbons-those were fripperies fit only for the frivolous French; a short blue, two-inch tail jacket turned up with red, and with a multiplicity of leaden buttons, all in the wrong places, much resembling the "dibs" that school-boys play with, and more the "stage money," the coinage of harmless counterfeit which the bounteous lady counts, from a tawdry purse, in the hand of the virtuous peasant in the melodrama. A flaming waistcoat with an eruption of buttons thereupon. A scarlet badge on the left arm with an embossed brazen shield, bearing Frankfort's free and imperial arms,- -an eagle in a seeming state of dubiety whether to have two heads or one, probably designed by way of compliment to the rival powers, Austria and Prussia, and so making up its mind to looking like a griffin with some Isis blood in its veins. A battered bugle, suspended en bandoulière by a parti-coloured worsted cord, finished off behind by two bulbous, pendulous excrescences, coloured red and white, that were neither dumb-bells,