rougher packages at every moment. But then was the time to behold my father!-amidst the confusion, he thought for everybody, cared for everybody, encouraged everybody, kept everybody in good humour. How he exerted himself! how his loud, rich voice might be heard in all directions, ordering, arranging, explaining, till the household storm gradually subsided! Each half-hour improved our condition; fires blazed in every room; at last we all sat down to our tea, spread by ourselves on a huge package before the drawing-room fire, sitting on boxes round it; and retired to sleep on our beds placed on the floor- the happiest, merriest, and busiest family in Christendom. In a few days, under my father's active exertions, everything was arranged with tolerable comfort in the little household, and it began to assume its wonted appearance.

"In speaking of the establishment of Foston, Annie Kay must not be forgotten. She entered our service at nineteen years of age, but possessing a degree of sense and lady-like feeling not often found in her situation of life-first as nurse, then as lady's-maid, then housekeeper, apothecary's boy, factotum, and friend. All who have been much at Foston or Combe Florey know Annie Kay; she was called into consultation on every family event, and proved herself a worthy oracle. Her counsels were delivered in the softest voice, with the sweetest smile, and in the broadest Yorkshire. She ended by nursing her old master through his long and painful illness, night and day; she was with him at his death; she followed him to his grave; she was remembered in his will; she survived him but two years, which she spent in my mother's house; and, after her long and faithful service of thirty years, was buried by my mother in the same cemetery as her master, respected and lamented by all his family, as the most faithful of servants and friends.

"So much for the interior of the establishment. Out-of-doors reigned Molly Mills-cow, pig, poultry, garden, and post-woman; with her short red petticoat, her legs like millposts, her high

cheek-bones red and shrivelled like winter apples; a perfect specimen of a 'yeowoman;' a sort of kindred spirit, too; for she was the wit of the village, and delighted in a crack with her master, when she could get it. She was as important in her vocation as Annie Kay in hers; and Molly here, and Molly there, might be heard in every direction. Molly was always merry, willing, active, and true as gold; she had little book-learning, but enough to bring up two fine athletic sons, as honest as herself; though, unlike her, they were never seen to smile, but were as solemn as two owls, and would not have said a civil thing to save their lives. They ruled the farm. Add to these the pet donkey, Bitty, already introduced to the public; a tame fawn, at last dismissed for eating the maid's clothes, which he preferred to any other diet; and a lame goose, condemned at last to be roasted for eating all the fruit in the garden; together with Bunch and Jack Robinson-and you have the establishment."

An anecdote of Smith's first visit to Foston, preserved by Lady Holland, is a good index of his character at all times, and of his subsequent position in the village. The house and grounds presented the most forbidding appearance. To shed light upon the scene: "The clerk, the most important man in the village, was summoned; a man who had numbered eighty years, looking, with his long gray hair, his threadbare coat, deep wrinkles, stooping gait, and crutch-stick, more ancient than the parsonage-house. He looked at my father for some time from under his gray, shaggy eyebrows, and held a long conversation with him, in which the old clerk showed that age had not quenched the natural shrewdness of the Yorkshireman. At last, after a pause, he said, striking his crutch-stick on the ground, Muster Smith, it often stroikes moy moind, that people as comes frae London is such fools. . . . But you,' he said (giving him a nudge with his stick), 'I see you are no fool."" The foraging accommodations of the parish were once feelingly described by Sydney Smith: "My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from

a lemon." In his jesting way, he said, "When I began to thump the cushion of my pulpit, on first coming to Foston, as is my wont when I preach, the accumulated dust of a hundred and fifty years made such a cloud, that for some minutes I lost sight of my congregation."

Sydney Smith was forty-three when he began his residence at Foston. He remained there fourteen years, until his appointment, by Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, to a vacant stall at Bristol. They were years of some privation, which was overcome by economy, and the incumbent's great mastery of the laws of human happiness. At one time, in a season of the failure of the harvest, the family, with their neighbours, were obliged to dispense with bread, and consume, as best they could, the damaged, sprouted wheat. A malignant fever in the parish was the consequence of this distress, which brought out the medical and humanitary resources of the rector. Courageous in risking life on this, as on similar occasions, he did much to alleviate the general misery. Inability to purchase books at this period, must have been a frequent annoyance. The omniscient Edinburgh Reviewer conscientiously abstained from running in debt for a cyclopædia. His friends, however, and the neighbouring library of Castle Howard, where he enjoyed a warm intimacy with the Earl of Carlisle, in a great measure supplied the deficiency.*

* The Earl of Carlisle of this period was Frederick (grandfather of the present Earl), the relative and guardian of Lord Byron. The poet dedicated to him his Hours of Idleness, vilified him in his famous satire, and apologized in Childe Harold. Lord Carlisle wrote tragedies: The Father's Revenge (which Dr. Johnson and Walpole praised), The Step-Mother, and various Poems. He came to America during the Revolutionary war, fellow-commissioner with William Eden (Lord Auckland), and Governor Johnstone, with offers of peace, and was challenged by La Fayette, for terms used in the Address to Congress, derogatory to France. In Jesse's "Selwyn and his Contemporaries," there are numerous agreeable letters of Carlisle- among them two, written from Philadelphia and New York, with notices of "Mr. Washington," and the war, which were pleasantly introduced by Mr. Thackeray, in his recent lecture on George III. Lord Carlisle died in 1825. at the age of seventy-seven.

HOUSEKEEPING HUMOURS.

53

In the midst of all embarrassments, however, Foston was not an unhappy home. The humours of its lord had full play. He was the hero of domestic life, his resources-his kindness, his wit, his personal humour, never failing. Numerous anecdotes of this nature are preserved in the narrative of his daughter-the charm of whose work is its thoroughly woman's picture of the household habits, which, after all, stamp the man. They may be briefly summed up in his art of happiness; his industry, constant self-culture, a curious fondness for the minutiae of the menage, attention to the common duties of life, care of his parishioners, attachment of his servants, and the cement of those noble friendships which brought Horner, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, the Hollands, Rogers, to his hospitable home-an inviting baiting-place for these keen appreciators of wit and good-nature, which he characteristically christened the Rector's Head.

Within doors he made good taste and original management do the work of wealth in promoting comfort. He contrived cheap decorations for his windows, his ceilings, and his fireplaces, ingeniously brightening his fires by a ventilating aperture. His bed-rooms were placarded with unframed prints, full of elevating suggestions. The arrangements of his store-room and apothecary's shop were among the curiosities of the place. Out of doors his management was quite as peculiar. He oddly economized time in farming his acres, by the use of "a tremendous speaking trumpet" at his door, with the supplement of a spy-glass, to bring the operations under view. His humanity to his cattle was shown in a way said to have been practised by a Duke of Argyle, in alleviating the distressed cuticles of his irritated tenantry. He set up a skeleton machine in the midst of a field, ingeniously arranged for every four-footed creature to rub against, which he called his Universal Scratcher. He carried his household to church, a mile distant from the parsonage, through the miry clay, more successfully than the family of the Vicar of Wakefield, in the adventure of Blackberry and the pillion, in his old furbished-up carriage, the

Immortal, drawn by his cart-horse in shafts, and guided by the carter on foot. At the barn-like church fifty persons were, on one occasion, probably an average one, present.

The portrait of Bunch, that important portion of the Foston family, is immortal; a sketch from reality equal to the imagination of Dickens. Mrs. Marcet, the author of the Conversations on Political Economy, an old friend of the host, exhibits her in full play :

"I was coming down stairs one morning, when Mr. Smith suddenly said to Bunch, who was passing, 'Bunch, do you like roast duck or boiled chicken?' Bunch had probably never tasted either the one or the other in her life, but answered, without a moment's hesitation, 'Roast duck, please, sir,' and disappeared. I laughed. 'You may laugh,' said he, but you have no idea of the labour it has cost me to give her that decision of character. The Yorkshire peasantry are the quickest and shrewdest in the world, but you can never get a direct answer from them; if you ask them even their own names, they always scratch their heads, and say, 'A's sur ai don't knaw, sir;' but I have brought Bunch to such perfection, that she never hesitates now on any subject, however difficult. I am very strict with her. Would you like to hear her repeat her crimes? She has them by heart, and repeats them every day.' 'Come here, Bunch!' calling out to her, 'come and repeat your crimes to Mrs. Marcet;' and Bunch, a clean, fair, squat, tidy little girl, about ten or twelve years of age, quite as a matter of course, as grave as a judge, without the least hesitation, and with a loud voice, began to repeat: 'Plate-snatching, gravy-spilling, doorslamming, blue-bottle-fly-catching, and courtesy-bobbing.' 'Explain to Mrs. Marcet what blue-bottle-fly-catching is.' 'Standing, with my mouth open and not attending, sir.' 'And what is courtesy-bobbing? Courtesying to the centre of the earth, please, 'Good girl! now you may go.' 'She makes a capital waiter, I assure you; on state occasions Jack Robinson, my carpenter, takes off his apron and waits too, and does pretty well, but

sir.'