"You perceive," continued Mr. Varley, "that each of these four quadrants are divided into three unequal parts, rising from the centre to the circumference. The four smaller ones are called the angular or the ascendant houses, or mid-heaven or meridian; these are deemed most powerful and fortunate. The next four are called the succedent, the eleventh, second, eighth and fifth houses, and are next in force. Then come the third class, or cadent houses: when a child is born, we observe clearly how the planets stand -- there are but five aspects for them, their being in Conjunction, Sextile, Quartile, Trine, or Opposition."

I confessed myself extremely puzzled with all this, which seemed rather to give my instructor pleasure than otherwise. "Astrology," said he, "is no vulgar or common science; it is not to be learned in a day : indeed it is never learned; as there are fresh discoveries in it every day."

"So I should think," I said, drily enough, "for the discovery of any new planet must put out all your reckoning. But how do you account, Sir, for this extraordinary influence, that you assert is exerted on the human race, by these very distant bodies the stars, that is by philosophical means?”

Mr. Varley looked a little disconcerted, and I thought a little angry; but his brow soon cleared, and he answered, cheerfully enough, "Your question is a startling one; I have not time to go into a long explanation now, but I shall see you again in a few months; and then if you please we shall renew the conversation."

"I should like you to give me somewhat of an answer now," I said, with a little malice, hoping to puzzle him: but I only drew down upon my own head such a torrent of terms and authorities, that I own I looked up helplessly in his face, and made a movement that it was time I should depart. But Mr. Varley now felt warmed in the subject, and Mr. Morton Moncton just then returning, he enlisted him in the service; so I was obliged to have my lesson all over again.

"Judicial Astrology," began the latter gentleman, "is the inspired daughter of Astronomy" and he looked most awfully at me.

"How do you know of her inspiration?" I ventured to enquire. It was a bold, a daring question. How did they both belabour me, not with their fists, certainly, but with their tongues. I wished myself heartily out of their clutches; yet still there was some sort of amusement in the scene. The crane-like figure of Mr. Moncton, his prominent nose, his eager eyes, his straggling hair, and his high-toned voice, made him a most curious, nondescript animal to gaze on. As for his child, he

scarcely deigned to look upon it; and if his lady had never come down stairs at all, happy would he have been, most certainly. He had his hot-water apparatus now most duly prepared for him by the repentant Mrs. Young, so that he never complained of cold during the night, and he could rove about at his pleasure, without interruption or idle questioning, from studio to observatory, and so on to the whole round of his pursuits.

"You want us to prove the inspiration of judicial astrology," demanded he, drawing up his slim person to its greatest height.

"I would rather hear, Sir," I asked, "an answer to my first question : that seems to me to involve the other."

"What was that, Varley?" demanded Mr. Moncton.

"Why do you not resolve the point at once, you who are a thorough master."

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Repeat your question, Madam," said the painter, with great pomposity; "and be careful, if you please, as to how you state it."

"I think I asked your friend, Sir, to account for the extraordinary influence the planets, so very remotely as they are situated from us, are said to have upon human beings? I wished it to be explained on philosophical grounds."

"Yes, I see," observed Mr. Moncton, pulling up his shirt-collar until it nearly touched his nose. "The question was put to you, Varley." "And I will answer it to the satisfaction of all the reasonable part of the world. As for the others, who cares a rush for them?" said Mr.

Varley.

I smiled inwardly, as I thought how very easy a thing it was for me to be deemed one of the reasonable part of the community. I had only to be fully convinced by the arguments of Mr. Varley, respecting the truth of astrological predictions.

"What said Sir Walter Raleigh respecting the planets, Madam?" commenced Mr. Varley: "that there were more things to be learned from them than in all the works of the ancients;"" and he looked triumphantly on me.

"No doubt that was his opinion, Sir," said I, wishing to pique him a little: "his assumption; but is it not possible that Sir Walter Raleigh might be wrong?"

"Could Albertus Magnus be wrong?" shouted Mr. Moncton at the top of his harsh, grating voice. "Could Virgil, the poet Virgil, Madam, be wrong? Luther, the great reformer? Merlin? St. Dunstan ? Ziitoo, King of Bohemia, afterwards Emperor of Germany, and a thousand others? Could they all be fools, blockheads, ignorant pretenders?" And he leaned down his lantern face towards me, as if he were going to eat

me.

"It is possible," I quietly answered. men have their weak points.'

"The very wisest and best of

"Give me leave," said Mr. Varley, bestowing on his friend a gentle push, which had nearly upset him. "I will decide the thing at once. The principal stars and planets, with regard to this earth, have certain aspects, according to their situation, being either benign or malignant; and they temper and influence the surrounding ambient with their rays; and by their configuration with the sun and moon, thus acting on a newborn infant in a most extraordinary manner; for the ambient, or ele

mentary matter, becomes saturated and prepared according to the healthy or baneful influence shed upon it; and this the child receives with its first inspiration."

"Now, what do you think of the matter?" screamed out Mr. Morton Moncton, flourishing his hand, and knocking off a chimney-ornament. "Are you not convinced, fully, entirely satisfied, of the vast importance attending the first breath an infant draws?"

"I am indeed," I answered; but there was a decided equivoque implied, which my two astrological teachers saw not. So they clapped their hands in high admiration of themselves, and of the reasonableness of their full-grown pupil: when I excused myself from any farther attendance, by saying I could no longer absent myself from Mrs. Moncton.

"Let us adjourn into the observatory, Varley," said Mr. Moncton, "and see if it be possible to make out a better horoscope between us for this little unfortunate. I will have him sent out to nurse immediately, and not endanger my own life and property, besides that of his mother," he added, by way of parenthesis, " since fire must be his prevailing element."

"Be careful of yourself, Madam," added Mr. Varley, opening the door for me, and pointing to my hand.

"Two salamanders in one house is rather too much of a good thing," muttered Mr. Morton Moncton, as I closed the door; and so we parted. I found the lady of the house, as she well might be, in a very ill humour; for I must own she had been most shamefully neglected, through my taking such a long astrological lesson. She asked me, with a sarcastic tone, if I had been much amused, and what the great magi below had said respecting the child. Of course I did not inform her that the chief one there had predicted it would be burnt to death, some time before it was ten years old; but Mrs. Young, who was still in the room, had not been quite so prudent. On being closely questioned, she had confessed all, and Mrs. Moncton had consequently become feverish and unwell. In vain I reasoned with her on the folly of believing that any of God's free creatures should be so fated, and acted on by dull pieces of rolling matter, as the stars certainly are, and nothing more. In vain I requested her to trust the destiny of her poor little boy to the care of its Creator. Nothing would pacify her; nothing prevent her from wailing over the unconscious babe, which set her a fine example, by its perfect quiescence, could she have profited by it, that its Creator was the best, the only judge of what was properest for it. Its will was not yet awakened to rebellion against the divine will; so it slumbered in peace. What is being burnt to death, a momentary bodily pang, or any other short-lived agony, to a mind that can consciously keep its will in such blessed subjection to that of the Author of our being.

About four o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Moncton moaned herself into a feverish slumber, and her room became hushed for about an hour or two. I sat in her easy chair, for I did not choose to retire myself to repose, seeing she was in so perturbed a state. I sat reflecting on the past, and on the strange conversation I had had with the two gentlemenastrologers down stairs. "It is certainly very extraordinary," thought I, "how that Mr. Varley should know how dreadfully I have suffered from fire." It is true the scar upon my hand might have given him the first

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clue; but how did he get at the information of the last most appalling event, when I was seven-and-twenty? I'll think no more of it. Sleeping baby let me take a lesson from thee. How should I be able to solve all that appears mysterious?" and I began to feel sleepy." Perhaps there is something in astrology, after all," said I,—and I began to dose. "Let me be careful, however, now, and not provoke my own fate, and of this little one too, it seems," I mistily argued, pushing my chair instinctively back from the grate above a foot; and then I gave up the point without farther contest, whether convinced or not I cannot say, for my spirit soared then far beyond the empire of memory. In short, I fell asleep.

"Am I dreaming or not?" was the first act of my unconsciousness, forced into activity by a loud uproar, as it seemed to me, by a thousand voices, a thousand sonorous raps upon the hall door. "Get up!" "Save yourselves! The house is in flames!" "There is not a moment to lose!" Bang, bang, went the door, and I flew to the window. Sure enough there was light outside, and fire, and sparks flying about in all directions, and all coming from our own residence. My first thought was to alarm the house; then to rush back and take care of my charge, the lady and her infant.

There was no time for ceremony. I huddled upon poor Mrs. Moncton's person all the cloaks and shawls I could scramble up: in spite of her lamentations, I insisted on drawing on her stockings, and putting over them a pair of snow-boots I happened to see in the closet: then taking a couple of blankets from the bed, and catching up the little "salamander," as his father called him, I half dragged away the mother, and carried the child down stairs. The doors had been forced open. A way was made for us by the mob, who had now collected in numbers. Both of them were safe wrapped up in the blankets I had brought down with me, and were immediately carried away and received into the house and bed of a kind neighbour.

Shall I confess my weakness? Yes! Why should I pretend to a strength of mind I do not possess. I saw all the servants, Mrs. Young, the aged house-keeper, even the spaniel dog, and the grey parrot, safely brought out of the blazing house; and various bundles, and trunks, and furniture also. But I saw not the master of the house, Mr. Moncton : yet, at that moment, I felt not the slightest alarm for his fate; for had not Mr. Varley and himself positively asserted that water, and not fire, was the element that was obnoxious to him? Though I knew that he had been in his observatory at the top of the house, where, it seems, the fire had originated, I stood still and gazed at the devouring flames with a calmness, regarding the life of Mr. Morton Moncton, that now appears ridiculous to me, as it fully certifies to me that I was then (whatever I may be now), without even knowing it, myself a convert to the profound occult art of judicial astrology, entirely forgetful that our very escape from the flames, the "little salamander" and myself, made quite as much against the truth of it. We ought both to have been destroyed by that fire, to have made out the prediction of my host and his friend.

"Where can Mr. Moncton be ?" screamed out the almost frantic Mrs. Young, when she could nowhere find him. "Has he perished in the flames? My dear beloved foster-son." At this time the engines

began to arrive, for Notting Hill was rather out of the way for their assistance sooner. Water, water was instantly in requisition; and one of the firemen ran to an enormous tank, or water-butt, to place the end of the leathern engine hose within it, that the water might be sent up and distributed over the ignited house.

"What the d- have we here?" shouted out the fireman, pulling out by the heels the unfortunate Mr. Morton Moncton; who, on finding out, from his elevated chamber, his danger, and that there was no retreat for him by the stairs, they being wholly burnt away, had ventured to descend by the water-spout, twisting his limber, tarantula-like limbs, legs and arms, most affectionately round it; but when near the bottom, he got, somehow or other, in a reversed position to what he should be or was at first, and, slipping his hold, fell down headlong into the waterbutt, or reservoir for the rain-water, when, not being able to get himself right again, he soon lost all sensibility, and was drawn out by the legs, like a drowned weazle, by the fireman.

But science, in all her branches, was not doomed as yet, to weep over the inanimate clay of her most favored son. Mr. Moncton soon shewed some signs of returning animation, on being carefully laid between hot blankets, and having his own apparatus (happily preserved) full of boiling water placed to his feet and ankles. Mrs. Young, his affectionate old servant, diligently attended to him, rubbing his cold spare limbs, and administering to him some "drops of brandy" at various times, which assisted most powerfully in his restoration.

Instead of feeling any sorrow for the loss of much valuable property-— (it is true great part of it was insured), and his valuable apparatus above and below, his painted Cleopatras, and his dying stone Didos-Mr. Moncton felt as if he had achieved a mighty victory. Had he not predicted that water was to be his foe? Had not his friend Varley made it clear to all," and no mistake," that the horoscope of his son pointed out the malignity of fire towards him? Had not astrology obtained a most triumphant wreath? There wanted but one little circumstance, I believe, to have rendered him, Mr. Morton Moncton, the happiest of men. Had the flames but rendered him a widower, he would have sung Jubilate! to the end of his days.

Handsome furnished lodgings were the next day procured, and thither in her carriage were carried the melancholy Mrs. Moncton, and the poor little "salamander," neither of them apparently injured by the cold or fright; but I had a very sad time of it until I got my release and entire remuneration, from her generous husband, for the loss of my own wardrobe. He soon after took a house at Blackheath, that he might be near the observatory at Greenwich, for the better making observations on the stars; having become very intimate with the late Dr. Pond, who allowed him full leave to use his noble apparatus, although I have heard that his successor did not afford the same facilities to amateurs, as it breaks in much upon his time, and, no doubt, upon his patience.

This fire at Notting-hill rendered Mr.Varley also quite cock-a-hoop, as they say; he carried his head an inch or two higher, and asked me, when he called at our temporary apartments in Kensington Gravel-pits, what I thought of judicial astrology now? "You are not out of danger, Madam, yet," said he impressively; "although, as regards yourself individually, your worst trial is over from your inexorable foe."