orner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of
friend's house, but it was large and straggling,--one of the individuals
of my old long knot of friends, card-players, pleasant companions, that
have tumbled to pieces, into dust and other things; and I got home on
Thursday, convinced that it was better to get home to my hole at
Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner." And at Enfield Elia was
far from being happy or contented. Winter, however,--"confining,
room-keeping winter," with its short days and long evenings, and cozy,
comfortable fireside and cheerful candle-light,--he succeeded in passing
tolerably pleasantly there; but the "deadly long days" of
summer--"all-day days," he called them, "with but a half-hour's
candle-light, and no fire-light"--were fearfully dull, wearisome, and
unprofitable to him, "a scorner of the fields," an exile from London.
And he thought, as he strolled through the green lanes and along the
pleasant country-roads in the vicinity of Enfield, of the days when he
was

"A clerk in London gay,"

and sighed for the drudgery and confinement of the counting-house, and
longed to take his seat again at his old desk at India-House. In brief,
Lamb felt that he should be happier and better, if he had something to
do. And partly to amuse himself, and partly to assist a friend, he
employed himself for a few months in a pleasant and congenial task. "I
am going through a course of reading at the Museum," he writes to
Bernard Barton,--"the Garrick plays, out of part of which I formed my
Specimens. I have two thousand to go through; and in a few weeks have
despatched the tithe of 'em. It is a sort of office-work to me; hours,
ten to four, the same. It does me good. Men must have regular occupation
that have been used to it." And in another (later) letter to Barton he
says, "I am giving the fruit of my old play-reading to Hone, who sets
forth a portion weekly in the 'Table-Book.'" And he not only furnished
the "Table-Book" with specimens of the Garrick plays, but he wrote for
that work, and the "Every-Day Book," a number of pleasant,
characteristic little sketches and essays. We herewith present the
reader with one of the best and most remarkable of these articles. Of
course all will observe, and admire, the humorous, yet very gentle,
loving, almost pathetic manner in which Elia describes the person and
character of Mary's old usher,--

CAPTAIN STARKEY.

To the Editor of the "Every-Day Book":--