deliberation, played the original and beautiful melody, cutting it, as it were, out of the instrument, and firing off each note so loud, clear, and sharp, that I am sure Stripes must have heard it in the stable.

"What a finger!" says Mrs. Ponto; and indeed it was a finger, as knotted as a turkey's drumstick, and splaying all over the piano. When she had banged out the tune slowly, she began a different manner of “Gettin' up Stairs," and did so with a fury and swiftness quite incredible. She spun up stairs; she whirled up stairs; she galloped up stairs; she rattled up stairs; and then, having got the tune to the top landing, as it were, she hurled it down again shrieking to the bottom floor, where it sank in a crash as if exhausted by the breathless rapidity of the descent. Then Miss Wirt played the "Gettin' up Stairs" with the most pathetic and ravishing solemnity: plaintive moans and sobs issued from the keys-you wept and trembled as you were gettin' up stairs. Miss Wirt's hands seemed to faint and wail and die in variations: again, and she went up with a savage clang and rush of trumpets, as if Miss Wirt was storming a breach; and although I knew nothing of music, as I sate and listened with my mouth open to this wonderful display, my caffy grew cold, and I wondered the windows did not crack and the chandelier start out of the beam at the sound of this earthquake of a piece of music.

"Glorious creature! Isn't she ?" said Mrs. Ponto. 66 Squirtz's favourite pupil-inestimable to have such a creature. Lady Carabas would give her eyes for her! A prodigy of accomplishments! Thank you, Miss Wirt!"-and the young ladies gave a heave and a gasp of admiration a deep-breathing gushing sound, such as you hear at church when the sermon comes to a full stop.

Miss Wirt put her two great double-knuckled hands round a waist of her two pupils, and said, "My dear children, I hope you will be able to play it soon as well as your poor little governess. When I lived with the Dunsinanes, it was the dear Duchess's favourite, and Lady Barbara and Lady Jane McBeth learned it. It was while hearing Jane play that, I remember, that dear Lord Castletoddy first fell in love with her? and though he is but an Irish Peer, with not more than fifteen thousand a year, I persuaded Jane to have him. Do you know Castletoddy, Mr. Snob ?—round

towers-sweet place-County Mayo. Old Lord Castletoddy (the present Lord was then Lord Inishowan) was a most eccentric old man-they say he was mad. I heard his Royal Highness the poor dear Duke of Sussex-(such a man, my dears, but alas! addicted to smoking!)-I heard his Royal Highness say to the Marquis of Anglesea, 'I am sure Castletoddy is mad!' but Inishowan wasn't in marrying my sweet Jane, though the dear child had but her ten thousand pounds pour tout potage!"

"Most invaluable person," whispered Mrs. Major Ponto to me. "Has lived in the very highest society:" and I, who have been accustomed to see governesses bullied in the world, was delighted to find this one ruling the roast, and to think that even the majestic Mrs. Ponto bent before her.

As for my pipe, so to speak, it went out at once. I hadn't a word to say against a woman who was intimate with every Duchess in the Red Book. She wasn't the rose-bud, but she had been near it. She had rubbed shoulders with the great, and about these we talked all the evening incessantly, and about the fashions, and about the Court, until bed-time came.

"And are there Snobs in this Elysium ?" I exclaimed, jumping into the lavender-perfumed bed. Ponto's snoring boomed from the neighbouring bed-room in reply.

CHAPTER XXVI.

ON SOME COUNTRY SNOBS.

SOMETHING like a journal of the proceedings of the Evergreens may be interesting to those foreign readers of Punch, who want to know the customs of an English gentleman's family and household. There's plenty of time to keep the Journal. Piano strumming begins at six o'clock in the morning; it lasts till breakfast, with but a minute's intermission, when the instrument changes hands, and Miss Emily practises in place of her sister, Miss Maria.

In fact, the confounded instrument never stops: when the young ladies are at their lessons, Miss Wirt hammers away at

those stunning variations, and keeps her magnificent finger in exercise.

I asked this great creature in what other branches of education she instructed her pupils ? "The modern languages," says she modestly, "French, German, Spanish, and Italian, Latin and the rudiments of Greek if desired. English of course; the practice of Elocution, Geography and Astronomy, and the Use of the Globes, Algebra, (but only as far as quadratic equations); for a poor ignorant female, you know, Mr. Snob, cannot be expected to know everything. Ancient and Modern History no young woman can be without; and of these I make my beloved pupils perfect mistresses. Botany, Geology, and Mineralogy, I consider as amusements. And with these I assure you we manage to pass the days at the Evergreens not unpleasantly."

Only these, thought I-what an education! But I looked in one of Miss Ponto's manuscript song-books and found five faults. of French in four words: and in a waggish mood asking Miss Wirt whether Dante Algiery was so called because he was born at Algiers? received a smiling answer in the affirmative, which made me rather doubt about the accuracy of Miss Wirt's knowledge.

When the above little morning occupations are concluded, these unfortunate young women perform what they call Callisthenic Exercises in the garden. I saw them to-day, without any crinoline, pulling the garden roller.

Dear Mrs. Ponto was in the garden too, and as limp as her daughters; in a faded bandeau of hair, in a battered bonnet, in a holland pinafore, in pattens, on a broken chair, snipping leaves off a vine. Mrs. Ponto measures many yards about in an evening. Ye heavens! what a guy she is in that skeleton morning costume!

Besides Stripes, they keep a boy called Thomas or Tummus. Tummus works in the garden or about the pigstye and stable; Thomas wears a page's costume of eruptive buttons.

When anybody calls, and Stripes is out of the way, Tummus flings himself like mad into Thomas's clothes, and comes out metamorphosed like Harlequin in the pantomime. To-day, as Mrs. P. was cutting the grape-vine, as the young ladies were at

VOL. I.

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the roller, down comes Tummus like a roaring whirlwind, with "Missus, Missus, there's company coomin!" Away skurry the young ladies from the roller, down comes Mrs. P. from the old chair, off flies Tuinmus to change his clothes, and in an incredibly short space of time Sir John Hawbuck, my Lady Hawbuck, and Master Hugh Hawbuck are introduced into the garden with brazen effrontery by Thomas, who says, "Please Sir Jan and my Lady to walk this year way: I know Missus is in the rosegarden."

And there, sure enough, she was!

In a pretty little garden bonnet, with beautiful curling ringlets, with the smartest of aprons and the freshest of peal-coloured gloves, this amazing woman was in the arms of her dearest Lady Hawbuck. "Dearest Lady Hawbuck, how good of you! Always among my flowers! can't live away from them!"

"Sweets to the sweet! hum-a-ha-haw!" says Sir John Hawbuck, who piques himself on his gallantry, and says nothing without "a-hum-a-ha-a-haw!"

"Whereth yaw pinnafaw ?" cries Master Hugh, "We thaw you in it, over the wall, didn't we, Pa ?"

"Hum-a-ha-a-haw!" burst out Sir John, dreadfully alarmed, "Where's Ponto? Why wasn't he at Quarter Sessions? How are his birds this year, Mrs. Ponto-have those Carabas pheasants done any harm to your wheat? a-hum-a-ha-a-haw!" and all this while he was making the most ferocious and desperate signals to his youthful heir.

"Well, she wath in her pinnafaw, wathn't she, Ma?" says Hugh, quite unabashed; which question Lady Hawbuck turned away with a sudden query regarding her dear darling daughters, and the enfant terrible was removed by his father.

"I hope you weren't disturbed by the music," Ponto says. "My girls, you know, practise four hours a-day, you know-must do it, you know-absolutely necessary. As for me, you know I'm an early man, and in my farm every morning at five-no, no laziness for me."

The facts are these. Ponto goes to sleep directly after dinner on entering the drawing-room, and wakes up when the ladies

leave off practice at ten. From seven till ten, and from ten till five, is a very fair allowance of slumber for a man who says he's not a lazy man. It is my private opinion, that when Ponto retires to what is called his "Study," he sleeps too. He locks himself up there daily two hours with the newspaper.

I saw the Hawbuck scene out of the Study which commands the garden. It's a curious object, that Study. Ponto's library mostly consists of boots. He and Stripes have important interviews here of mornings, when the potatoes are discussed, or the fate of the calf ordained, or sentence passed on the pig, &c. All the major's bills are docketed on the Study table and displayed like a lawyer's briefs. Here, too, lie displayed his hooks, knives, and other gardening irons, his whistles, and strings of spare buttons. He has a drawer of endless brown paper for parcels, and another containing a prodigious and never-failing supply of string. What a man can want with so many gig-whips I can never conceive. These, and fishing-rods, and landing-nets, and spurs, and boot-trees, and balls for horses, and surgical implements for the same, and favourite pots of shiny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes in the most elegant manner, and buck-skin gloves stretched out on their trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his boot-hooks underneath in a trophy; and the family medicine-chest, and in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the "Study" but for that awful purpose)-all these, with Mogg's Road Book, the Gardeners' Chronicle, and a backgammon board, form the Major's library. Under the trophy there's a picture of Mrs. Ponto, in a light blue dress and train, and no waist, when she was first married; a fox's brush lies over the frame, and serves to keep the dust off that work of art.

t

"My library's small," says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, "but well selected, my boy-well selected. I have been reading the History of England all the morning."