munificent benefactors.
But we fear that our pleading will be vain--Englishmen, poor, sick, and
suffering, are intolerably uninteresting; not to be named on the same
day with the happy possessors of woolly locks, flat noses, and
copper-coloured skins; these being personal qualifications calculated to
excite the intense sympathies of the many whose charity neither begins
nor ends "at home." Yet, in the spirit of the little girl, who, on the
denial of her request that she might be married, substituted the more
modest one of a piece of bread and butter; if unsuccessful in this
particular, we will be content to lower our tone, and, in place of the
luxury we have recommended, simply require all whom it may concern to
give the poor--their own!--honest wages for their honest labour.

We may perhaps be accused of having a Turkish taste in music (after the
pattern of that Sultan's, who was chiefly fascinated with the jarring
process of tuning the instruments, a thing abhorred by "gods and men")
if we venture to own the strange, thrilling effect once produced on us
by the discordant, yet withal imposing clangour of some half dozen
regimental bands (all of them, mark you, playing different tunes!) which
struck up simultaneously as my Lord ----, the then commander-in-chief,
(whose spirit has since mingled with the shades of the heroes who had
preceded him, not to the hall of Odin, but we trust to a more Christian
place,) made his appearance, with his brilliant staff, on ---- Moor;
whither he came down ostensibly for the purpose of reviewing the
troops--really, to marry his nephew and heir to the grand-daughter of a
manufacturing millionnaire. (Commercial gold, or heraldic _or_, is a
good modern "tricking;" though we query whether our ancestors would have
countenanced such bad heraldry, or been content with such abatements of
honour on their old shields!)

The wild sounds streamed on the crisp morning air--'twas one of those
September days whose mature beauty rivals the budding grace of
spring--with a strange wayward beauty, a barbaric grandeur, that carried
away both our heart and ears; and we enjoyed it to the full as much as
did the steed of a military lady present, that verily danced with the
tingling delight. We had a fellow feeling with the brute, and could
ourselves, grave and sensible as we are, have pranced about in an
ecstasy of admiration, which was by no means allayed when the deep-toned
sullen music--for such it is to