samond! Rosamond! Rosamond!" At the last of these magic cries,
the grand window burst open with the sudden crash of a tempest, and
through it descended the lovely Rosamond into the middle of the room.

The Doctor was in a cold sweat, and while he dried himself, the Queen,
who thought her fair visitant a thousand times the fairer for the
additional difficulty in procuring this second sight, for once let her
prudence sleep, and, in a transport of enthusiasm, stepping out of her
circle with open arms, cried out, "My dear likeness!" No sooner was the
word out, than a violent clap of thunder shook the whole palace; a black
vapour filled the gallery, and a train of little fantastic lightnings
serpentined to the right and left in the dazzled eyes of the company.

When the obscurity was a little dissipated, they saw the magician, with
his four limbs in air, foaming like a wild boar, his cap here, his
wig there--in short, by no means an object of either the sublime or
beautiful. But though he came off the worst, yet no one in the adventure
escaped _quite clear_, except Rosamond. The lightning burned away my
Lord of Essex's right brow; Sir Sidney lost the left mustachio; her
majesty's head-dress smelt villanously of the sulphur, and her
hoop-petticoat was so puckered up with the scorching, that it was
ordered to be preserved among the royal draperies, as a warning, to all
maids of honour to come, against curiosity.

HOW I BECAME A YEOMAN.

BY PROFESSOR AYTOUN.

[_MAGA._ SEPTEMBER 1846.]

CHAPTER I.

Had the royal army of Israel been accoutred after the colour and fashion
of the British battalions, I am quite satisfied that another enigma
would have been added by King Solomon to his special list of
incomprehensibilities. The extraordinary fascination which a red coat
exercises over the minds and optics of the fair sex, appears to me a
greater phenomenon than any which has been noticed by Goethe in his
Theory of the Development of Colours. The same fragment of ensanguined
cloth will irritate a bull, charm a viper, and bewitch the heart of a
woman. No civilian, however good-looking or clean-limbed--and I rather
pique myself upon my pins--has the ghost of a chance when opposed in the
lists of love to an officer, a mail-guard, a whipper-in, or a postman.
You may be as clever a fellow as ever coopered up an article for the
Magazine, as great a poet as Byron, in beauty an Antinous, in wit a
Selwyn, in oratory a Canning--