gether too much precocity for a genuine
boy, in the nice discrimination with which the Boy at Mugby hit off the
contrasting nationalities. The foreigner, for example, who politely,
hat in hand, "beseeched Our Young Ladies, and our Missis," for a "leetel
gloss hoif prarndee," and who, after being repelled, on trying to help
himself, exclaims, "with hands clasped and shoulders riz: 'Ah! is it
possible this; that these disdaineous females are placed here by the
administration, not only to empoisen the voyagers, but to affront them!
Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave?
Or idiot?'" Hardly would a veritable boy, even an urchin so well "to the
fore" with his epoch, as the Boy at Mugby, depict so accurately, much
less take off, with a manner so entirely life-like, the astounded
foreigner, any more than he would the thoroughly wide-awake and gaily
derisive American. The latter he describes as alternately trying and
spitting out first the sawdust and then the--ha, ha!--the sherry, until
finally, on paying for both and consuming neither, he says, very loud,
to Our Missis, and very good tempered, "I tell Yew what 'tis ma'arm. I
la'af. Theer! I la'af, I Dew. I oughter ha' seen most things, for I hail
from the unlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled
right slick over the Limited, head on, through Jeerusalem and the East,
and likeways France and Italy, Europe, Old World, and I am now upon the
track to the Chief European Village; but such an Institution as Yew and
Yewer fixins, solid _and_ liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never
did see yet! And if I hain't found the eighth wonder of Monarchical
Creation, in finding Yew and Yewer fixins, solid and liquid, in a
country where the people air not absolute Loo-naticks, I am Extra
Double Darned with a nip and frizzle to the innermost grit!
Wheerfore--Theer!--I la'af! I Dew, ma'arm. I la'af!" A calotype, or
rather, literally, a speaking likeness, so true to the life as that,
would be a trifle, we take it, beyond the mimetic powers and the keenly
observant faculties even of a Boy whose senses had been wakened up by
the twenty-seven cross draughts of the Refreshment Room at Mugby.

As to the fun made of the bandolining by Our Young Ladies, and of Our
Missis's lecture on Foreign Refreshmenting, and of Sniff's corkscrew
and his servile disposition, it is intentionally fooling, no doubt,
but it is--excellent fooling! As was admirably said in