slie has picked up in his walks, and considered a rare mineral. It
is neatly labelled, "Found in Hollow Lane, May 21st, 1804, by Maunder
Slugge Leslie, Esq." The next division holds several bits of iron in
the shape of nails, fragments of horse-shoes, etc., which Mr. Leslie
has also met with in his rambles, and, according to a harmless popular
superstition, deemed it highly unlucky not to pick up, and, once picked
up, no less unlucky to throw away. Item, in the adjoining pigeon-hole, a
goodly collection of pebbles with holes in them, preserved for the same
reason, in company with a crooked sixpence; item, neatly arranged in
fanciful mosaics, several periwinkles, Blackamoor's teeth (I mean the
shell so called), and other specimens of the conchiferous ingenuity of
Nature, partly inherited from some ancestral spinster, partly amassed
by Mr. Leslie himself in a youthful excursion to the seaside. There were
the farm-bailiff's accounts, several files of bills, an old stirrup,
three sets of knee and shoe buckles which had belonged to Mr. Leslie's
father, a few seals tied together by a shoe-string, a shagreen toothpick
case, a tortoise shell magnifying-glass to read with, his eldest son's
first copybooks, his second son's ditto, his daughter's ditto, and a
lock of his wife's hair arranged in a true lover's knot, framed and
glazed. There were also a small mousetrap; a patent corkscrew too good
to be used in common; fragments of a silver teaspoon, that had, by
natural decay, arrived at a dissolution of its parts; a small brown
holland bag, containing halfpence of various dates, as far back as Queen
Anne, accompanied by two French sous and a German silber gros,--the
which miscellany Mr. Leslie magniloquently called "his coins," and had
left in his will as a family heirloom. There were many other curiosities
of congenial nature and equal value--quae nunc describere longum est.
Mr. Leslie was engaged at this time in what is termed "putting things
to rights,"--an occupation he performed with exemplary care once a week.
This was his day; and he had just counted his coins, and was slowly
tying them up again in the brown holland bag, when Frank's knock reached
his ears.

Mr. Maunder Slugge Leslie paused, shook his head as if incredulously,
and was about to resume his occupation, when he was seized with a fit of
yawning which prevented the bag being tied for full two minutes.

While such the employment of the study, let us turn to the re