t when you are led by her across the
heath to drop a stone into that deep and narrow gulf to which our story
relates,--when you stand on its slippery edge, and (parting the long
grass with which it is covered) gaze into its mysterious depths,--when
she describes, with all the animation of an _eye witness_, the
struggles of the victims grasping the grass as a last hope of
preservation, and trying to drag in their assassin as an expiring
effort of vengeance,--when you are told that for 300 years the clear
waters in this diamond of the desert have remained untasted by mortal
lips, and that the solitary traveller is still pursued at night by the
howling of the bloodhound,--it is _then only_ that it is possible fully
to appreciate the terrors of THE MURDER HOLE.

_Blackwood's Magazine._

* * * * *

DANCING.

I never to a ball will go,
That poor pretence for prancing,
Where Jenkins dislocates a toe,
And Tomkins _thinks_ he's dancing:
And most I execrate that ball,
Of balls the most atrocious,
Held yearly in old Magog's hall,
The feasting and ferocious.

I execrate the mob, the squeeze,
The rough refreshment-scramble:
The dancers, keeping time with knees
That knock as down they amble;
Between two lines of bankers' clerks,
Stared at by two of loobies--
All mighty fine for city sparks,
But all and each one boobies:--

Boobies with heads like poodle-dogs,
With curls like clew-lines dangling;
With limbs like galvanizing frogs,
And necks stiff-starched and strangling;
With pigeon-breasts and pigeon-wings,
And waists like wasps and spiders;
With whiskers like Macready's kings',
Mustachios like El Hyder's.

Miss Jones, the Moorfields milliner,
With Toilinet, the draper,
May waltz--for none are _willinger_
To cut cloth or a caper.--
Miss Moses of the Minories,
With Mr. Wicks of Wapping,
May love such light tracasseries,
Such shuffle shoe and hopping:

Miss Hicks, the belle of Holywell,
And pride of Norton Falgate,
In waltzing may the world excel,
Except Miss Hicks of Aldgate.
Well, let them--'tis their nature--twirl,
And Smiths adore their twirlings,
Which kill with envy every girl
That fingers lace at Urling's,

I laugh while I lament to see
A fellow, made to measur