. All the birds are awake,
and are soon in full chorus. Presently a flush of color will run around
the horizon, and it will be dawn. The actual night has flown. I can
hear Smith, our grocery-man around the corner, setting off into the
country for his milk and eggs. Several marketcarts are abroad.... There
goes an extra train, shrieking direly along the curve.

It is actually growing light. With the first gleam of day my excellent
aunt--who embodies all my future expectations of wealth--sleeping in the
next chamber, turns in her bed, yawns loudly and unreservedly, gets up
and takes an observation, opening and closing her shutters with a bang.
By breakfast-time my revered relation becomes a respectable and no
longer a riotous member of society, but during the early morning hours
her inventions for disturbing her neighbors are ingenious and
diabolical.

By five o'clock the morning-trains begin, followed at half-past six by
fifty factory-whistles. The children are awake and stirring. The
housemaid is banging her utensils on piazza and in hallway: the cook is
flirting with the milk-and butter-man at the back gate, and exclaiming
"Oh Laws!" to some news or pleasantry of his. The licensed venders are
abroad. There are all sorts of cries. It is less than an hour to
breakfast. The night is lost: one foolish, intolerable noise has spoiled
all.

L.W.

TABARIN, THE FRENCH MERRY-ANDREW.

The French word _tabarin_ is almost obsolete, and its English synonym,
_merry-andrew_, is not much in vogue, but as they are andronymics, to
coin a word, embalming the memories of two famous charlatans, they
possess an abiding interest apart from all question of their use or
disuse.

Andrew Borde and Tabarin were both charlatans and both famous, but here
all resemblance between them ceases. The former was a witty and
eccentric quack, who travelled about from place to place and country to
country selling drugs and practising medicine in fairs and marketplaces,
where his glib tongue readily gathered crowds and earned him the
nickname which has since passed current in English as a generic term for
buffoons of all sorts and conditions. The tenth volume of the _Extra
Series_ of the Early English Text Society is wholly devoted to Borde,
and well repays perusal, although probably few who read it will agree
with Mr. Furnivall, the editor, that "any one who would make him more of
a merry-andrew than anything else is a bigger fool than he wo