bundled in too, and sat with her back to the horses. But that ten minutes' drive was so horrible that not one of them ever spoke of it again.

They need not have been so miserable, poor people, if they had only known Patty had safely reached her grandmother's door by that time. When the concierge, who was sitting on his barrow at the door, let her in and looked at her with an odd expression in his face, "Simonne was in a great anxiety about you, Mademoiselle," said he; "she is not yet come in. Your grandmamma is upstairs as usual. Have you had a pleasant walk ? " Patty made no answer; she ran upstairs quickly. "I must not stay long," she said to herself. "I wonder if Rémy is there." The front door was open, and she went in, and then along the passage, and with a beating heart she stopped and knocked at her grandmother's door. "Come in, child," the old lady called out from the inside; and as Patty nervously fumbled at the handle, the voice inside added, "Lift up the latch, and the hasp will fall. Come in," and Patty went in as she was told.

It was getting to be a little dark indoors by this time, and the room seemed to Patty full of an odd dazzle of light-perhaps because the glass door of the dressing closet, in which many of Madame Capuchon's stores were kept, was open.

"Come here, child," said her grandmother, hoarsely, "and let me look at you."

"How hoarsely you speak," said Patty; "I'm afraid your cold is very bad, grandmamma."

The old lady grunted and shook her head. "My health is miserable at all times," she said. "What is that you have got in your basket?

butter, is it not, by the smell?"

"What a good nose you have, grandmamma," said Patty, laughing, and opening her basket. "I have brought you a little pat of butter and some honeycomb, with mamma's love," said Patty. "They will supply you from the hotel, if you like, at the same price you "Thank you, child," said Madame Capuchon. and let me look at you. Why, what is the matter? colours, blue, green, red.. What have you been doing, Miss? See if you can find my spectacles on that table."

pay now." "Come a little closer You are all sorts of

"What do you want them for, grandmamma ?" Patty asked, fumbling about among all the various little odds and ends.

"The better to see you, my dear, and anybody else who may call upon me," said the grandmamma, in her odd broken English. Patty was nervous still and confused, longing to ask whether Rémy had made his appearance, and not daring to speak his name first, and in her confusion she knocked over a little odd-shaped box that was upon the table, and it opened and something fell out.

"Be careful, child! What have you done?" said the old lady sharply. "Here, give the things to me."

"It's-it's something made of ivory, grandmamma," said stupid Patty, looking up bewildered. "What is it for?"

"Take care; take care.

comfortably without them,"

Those are my teeth, child. I cannot eat said the old lady pettishly. "And now I want to talk seriously. Here, give me your hand, and look me in the face, and tell me honestly what you think of a certain . . . . ?

But at that instant a loud ring at the bell was heard, and voices in the passage; the door of the room flew open, and Mrs. Maynard rushed in, burst into a flood of tears, and clasped her daughter to her beating heart.

"I tell you she is here, monsieur," Simonne was saying to Maynard himself, who was following his wife. As soon as he saw her there, with Patty in her arms, "Now, Martha," he said, "you will at last believe what a goose you are at times," and he began to laugh in a superior sort of fashion, and then he choked oddly, and sat down with his face hidden in his hands.

"But what is it all about?" asked Madame Capuchon, from her bed. Poor people! They could hardly own or tell or speak the thought which had been in their minds, so horrible and so absurd as it now seemed. They tried to pass it over; and, indeed, they never owned to one another what that ten minutes' drive had been.

It was all over now, and Patty, in penitent tears, was confessing what had detained her. They could not be angry at such a time, they could only clasp her in their loving arms. All the little miniatures were looking on from their hooks on the wall, the old grandmother was shaking her frills in excitement, and nodding and blinking encouragement from her alcove.

"Look here, Henry," said she to her son-in-law. "I have seen the young man, and I think he is a very fine young fellow. In fact, he is now waiting in the dining-room, for I sent him away when I heard la petite coming. I wanted to talk to her alone. Félicie has written to me on the subject of their union; he wishes it, I wish it, Patty wishes it; oh, I can read little girls' faces: he has been called to the bar; my property will remain undivided; why do you oppose their marriage? I cannot conceive what objection you can ever have had to it."

"What objection!" said the squire, astounded. self warned me.

"Why, you your

Félicie writes as usual with an eye to her own interest

a grasping, covetous--"

"Hush, hush, dear," interceded Mrs. Maynard, gently pushing her husband towards the door. The old lady's hands and frills were trembling more and more by this time; she was not used to being thwarted; the. squire also was accustomed to have his own way.

"My Félicie, my poor child, I cannot suffer her to be spoken of in this way," cried Madame Capuchon, who at another time would have been the first to complain.

"Patty is only sixteen," hazarded Mrs. Maynard.

"I was sixteen when I married," said Madame Capuchon.

"Patty shall wait till she is sixty-six before I give her to a penniless adventurer," cried the squire in great wrath.

"Very well," said the old lady, spitefully. "Now I will tell you what

I have told him. As I tell you, he came to see me just now, and is at this moment, I believe, devouring the remains of the pie Simonne prepared for your luncheon. I have told him that he shall be my heir whether you give him Patty or not. I am not joking, Henry, I mean it. I like the young man exceedingly. He is an extremely well-bred young fellow, and will do us all credit."

Maynard shrugged his shoulders and looked at his wife.

"But, child, do you really care for him?" Patty's mother said reproachfully. "What can you know of him?" and she took both the little hands in hers.

Little Patty hung her head for a minute. "Oh, mamma, he has told me everything; he told me he did think of the money at first, but only before he knew me. Dear papa, if you talked to him you would believe him, indeed you would-indeed, indeed you would." Patty's imploring wistful glance touched the squire, and as she said, Maynard could not help believing in Rémy when he came to talk things over quietly with him, and without losing his temper.

He found him in the dining-room, with a bottle of wine and the empty pie-dish before him; the young man had finished off everything but the bones and the cork and the bottle. "I had no breakfast, sir," said Rémy, starting up, half laughing, half ashamed. "My grandmother told me to look in the cupboard."

"Such a good appetite should imply a good conscience," Maynard thought; and at last he relented, and eventually grew to be very fond of his son-in-law.

Patty and Rémy were married on her seventeenth birthday. I first saw them in the court-yard of the hôtel, but afterwards at Sunnymede, where they spent last summer.

Madame Capuchon is not yet difficult thing to get anywhere good. tries hard to satisfy her mistress.

satisfied with the butter. It is a very Simonne is as devoted as ever, and

Gossip on our Rosalinds.

As You Like It is one of the many plays of Shakspeare that suffered much at the hands of the Shakspeare-tinkers, of which class Charles Johnson was one. He was a man whose career was of considerable variety. Like a number of other young fellows who had commenced life as a student of law, he took to reading plays instead of Coke upon Littelton, to going to the theatres in Lincoln's Inn Fields and Drury Lane instead of to the law courts. Any day he might be seen abroad with Sir Harry Wildair, or what is the same thing, Mr. Wilks--the latter all airiness and fine-gentlemanism-towards whom many a bright eye was directed, as the handsome actor passed along the causeway or under the piazza, while many a smile greeted him as his slight but sweet Irish accent was recognized in his lofty-toned conversations with his stout friend. Charles Johnson had an alacrity in growing fat: he begun at an early period, and never left off till he died. Wilks breathed him pretty freely, but Charles panted heavily, yet happily, as he kept up with his lighterheeled and swifter-going friend. His admiration for Wilks was unbounded, and the graceful player repaid the homage by helping to bring on the stage about a score of Johnson's plays. These were all more or less popular in their day. They all belong to the earlier part of the last century, and are all wrapped in wholesome oblivion now; but, in their time, they made a celebrity of their author, and as he went into Will's or Button's, or looked out of the window upstairs, a poet or a player at his side, the street-public gazed at the group with interest. At that period every man of note was known to the great body of the unknown, for London was not larger than Manchester is now, and in certain quarters of the town the same faces were to be seen every day.

Johnson, like most fat men, was a good-natured fellow. His worst enemies could not say more in his disparagement than that he might have been thinner. His popularity was manifested by the crowds that always attended the theatre on his benefit-the "author's nights," as they used to be called-and his audiences were inclined to look on his writing as something not far off the free style of Etherege, the easy vein of Sedley, the brilliancy of Congreve, or the epigrammatic humour of Wycherley. They took a certain ease and vivacity for proofs of wit. They forgot that Johnson was merely an adapter of other men's ideas, while, at the same time they were fain to confess that his tragedies only escaped being comedies because they were too dull to raise a laugh.

It is a curious social trait of those old times, not that this coffee-house gallant married a young widow with a fortune, but that he ceased to be a gallant at all. He who had taken his punch, his chocolate, or his claret,

with the old bards and young beaux, the clever, idle, fine, witty, witless, or scampish gentlemen, who fluttered, talked, and settled the reputation of ministers, authors, poets, players, and toasts of the town, over their liquor, now took to serving customers of his own, in the character of a Boniface. With his wife's fortune, Johnson opened a tavern, or succeeded to one of the old ones in Bow Street. With his apron on and a scratch wig on his head, he could see his old fellows, the gallants, in cataract perruques and swords on their hips, going jauntily by to the resort of such dainty personages. But these sometimes made a night of it at "Charley's;" for Bow Street was then not a century old, and Covent Garden Theatre and the police office, as yet, were not. Gentry from the country had their lodg ings in this street during their sojourn in town, and great poets, and fashionable physicians, and famous players dwelt there, and Wilks himself lived next door to his friend, and thought none the worse of him for selling good wine and not objecting to long scores. When Johnson's wife died, the widower retired from business with great increase of fortune, and lived in very easy circumstances ever after.

Well, this dramatic author, who began life with an intention, on his father's part at least, that he should become a Lord Chancellor, and who ended it by being a retired tapster of considerable fortune, would hardly, perhaps, be remembered now at all but for having come under the scornful notice of Pope in the Dunciad, and for having been one of the most audacious of the Shakspeare-tinkers who re-wrote Shakspeare's plays, in the style in which they considered he ought to have written them, if he had had any regard for his own reputation.

Johnson took up a well-thumbed volume of Shakspeare's works that lay on an arm-chair in the little parlour behind the bar at Will's, on one wet morning, and he opened it at As You Like It. The rain without, and inclination within, enabled him to read it through with great interest; but when he closed the book, it was with something of the feeling of the sign-painter, who, after executing a red lion, thought of the jealous. feelings with which Titian would have regarded it, and exclaimed, goodnaturedly, "Poor little Titty!" Johnson held the volume in his hand, and shook his head. The play was good, but he thought it might have been better. Hitherto, As You Like It had been looked upon as something too finely exquisite for the stage: as partaking more of a poem than of a play. Rosalind was a part that neither Mrs. Betterton, Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Mountfort, Mrs. Oldfield, or any of that brilliant sisterhood, had ever ventured to attempt. There was nothing like Rosalind in any of the heroines of the modern comedy of the day. These heroines were hussies of the most audacious and intrepid character; women with none of the attributes of true, pure, womanly nature about them; and Rosalind was even thought too purely colourless a character for it to be likely to be popular with audiences accustomed to the obscenity which contemporary playwrights forced upon them against their wills, and tried to persuade a disgusted public that they liked it.