this blessed year's produce.
Hecate's forefinger mixes it in a quaich with mountain-dew--and that is
Atholl-brose?

There cannot be the least doubt in the world that the Hamiltonian
system of teaching languages is one of the best ever invented. It will
enable any pupil of common-run powers of attention to read any part of
the New Testament in Greek in some twenty lessons of an hour each. But
what is that to the principle of the Worm? Half a blessed hour has not
elapsed since we entered into the door of this hill-house, and we offer
twenty to one that we read Ossian _ad aperturam libri_, in the original
Gaelic. We feel as if we could translate the works of Jeremy Bentham
into that tongue--ay, even Francis Maximus Macnab's Theory of the
Universe. We guarantee ourselves to do both, this identical night before
we go to sleep, and if the printers are busy during the intermediate
hours, to correct the press in the morning. Why, there are not above
five thousand roots--but we are getting a little gizzy--into a state of
civilation in the wilderness--and, gentlemen, let us drink--in solemn
silence--the "Memory of Fingal."

O St Cecilia! we did not lay our account with a bagpipe! What is the
competition of pipers in the Edinburgh Theatre, small as it is, to this
damnable drone in an earth-cell, eight feet by six! Yet while the drums
of our ears are continuing to split like old parchment title-deeds to
lands nowhere existing, and all our animal economy, from finger to toe,
is one agonising dirl, Aeolus himself sits as proud as Lucifer in
Pandemonium; and as the old soldiers keep tending the Worm in the reek
as if all were silence, the male-looking females, and especially the
he-she with the imp at her breast, nod, and smirk, and smile, and snap
their fingers, in a challenge to a straspey--and, by all that is
horrible, a red hairy arm is round our neck, and we are half choked with
the fumes of whisky-kisses. An hour ago we were dreaming of Malvina! and
here she is with a vengeance, while we in the character of Oscar are
embraced till almost all the Lowland breath in our body expires.

And this is STILL-LIFE.

Extraordinary it is, that, go where we will, we are in a wonderfully
short time discovered to be Christopher North. A few years ago, the
instant we found our feet in a mine in Cornwall, after a descent of
about one-third the bored earth's diameter, we were saluted by name by a
grim Monops who had not seen the upper region