commission, which compelled him to make war on the whole nation. And great was the naturalist's surprise and perplexity when he received a letter informing him, in mercantile phraseology, that 80 monkeys had been shipped, as per copy of the bill of lading enclosed, and that his correspondent hoped to be able to execute the rest of the order in time for the next vessel.

Many, too, must have read a story which appeared in the English newspapers, a few months since, of the distressful predicament into which a poor fisherman's wife was thrown, by the receipt of a letter from her husband, who had been absent from home, with several of his brethren, beyond the ordinary time. The honest man stated, in piscatorial phrase, the causes of his detention, and what luck he had met with in his fishing. But the conclusion of his bulletin, as spelled by his loving amphibious helpmate, was as follows: 'I AM NO MORE!' The poor woman gazed awhile on this fatal official intelligence of her husband's demise, and then on her eleven now fatherless infants; and then she burst into a paroxysm of clamorous sorrow, which drew around her the consorts of seventeen other fishermen, who had departed in company with the deceased man. None of them could read; but they caught from the widow's broken lamentations the contents of

the supernatural postscript; and taking it for granted that they had all been served in the same manner by the treacherous element, they all lifted up their voices, and the corners of their aprons, and made an ululation worthy of so many forsaken mermaids. In the words of the poet, they made" 'igh water in the sea," on whose margin they stood; when one of the overseers of the poor, who came to the spot, alarmed by the rumour that the parish was like to be burthened with eighteen new widows and an hundred and odd parcel orphans, snatched the letter from the weeping Thetis, and silenced the grief of the company, by making out its conclusion correctly, which was, 'I add no more."

There is a memorable passage in our annals, which must be familiar to those who have read the old chronicles and records of our early colonial history. I allude to the consternation into which the General Court of the Massachusetts and their associated settlements were thrown, when their clerk read to them a letter from a worthy divine, purporting, that he addressed them, not as magistrates, but as a set of Indian Devils. The horror-stricken official paused in his prelection, aghast as was the clerk in England, for whose proper psalm a wag had substituted 'Chevy Chase,' when he came to the words

'woful hunting.' He looked at the manuscript again, and after a thorough examination, exclaimed, "yea! it is Indian Devils." A burst of indignation from the grave Sanhedrim, long, loud, and deep, followed this declaration. They would all have better brooked to have been called by the name of Baptists, Papists, or any other pestilent heretics, than to be branded as the very heathen, whom they had themselves never scrupled to compliment by calling them children of Belzebub. If I remember aright, the venerable Cotton Mather notes, in his biographies of the eminent divines of his day, that the innocent offender was, in this instance, roughly handled by the secular arm of justice, for insulting the dignitaries both of church and state, before he had opportunity of convincing his brother dignitaries that the offensive epithet, Indian Devils, was a pure mistake in their manner of reading his epistle; inasmuch as he had meant to employ the more harmless phrase, Individuals. The apology was accepted; though I observe that the latter word is, at present, deemed impolite, if not actionable, in Kentucky; and is as provoking to a citizen of that state, as it was to dame Quickly to be called a woman, and a thing to thank God on, by Sir John Falstaff.

I knew a gentleman, who would have been very well pleased to have received a lucrative appointment, in a certain state of the union; because his patrimony was nought, and his professional profits, to speak mathematically, were less. His joy was unbounded, therefore, on reading a letter from a very great man, who wrote a very little and a very bad hand, responsive to his application for the post which he coveted. He deciphered enough of the letter to make out, that many were soliciting the station for which he had applied, and that his testimonials had been received. But the concluding sentence was, that from the favourable augury of which the young ambition of the aspirant ran at once, in imagination, to the top of its ladder. "Though last, not least-were the cabalistic words, by the virtue of which he founded many Spanish castles; destined, alas! like those of Arabian enchantment, to vanish or fly away, at the spell of a more powerful magician, or the loss of the talisman which summoned the genii to erect them. He might have launched into dangerous prodigality, on the strength of his anticipated promotion, if a friend had not succeeded in convincing him, that the flourish with which the great man had terminated his honourable scrawl, if it was not a verse from the Koran, in the

D *

Arabic character, must have been meant for that very insignificant and unfruitful expression,"Yours, in haste."

No executive sunshine ever beamed on him. But being of a philosophic turn of mind, he devoted much of his time, for some years after his disappointment, to an analysis of the precise meaning of these three unlucky words, and read all the writers on our language, from the Diversions of Purley to the last wonderful discoveries on the subject, made in this country. I suppose that he past his time pleasantly in these researches, but not, I should think, very profitably: for the only result of all his reading, which I ever heard him utter, was, that' yours, in haste,' is a most unphilosophical, ungrammatical, and nonsensical expression, involving a confusion of time, place, and circumstance. He said, it was a sorites of bulls; a metaphysical absurdity; a moral insult to good sense and good feeling; and that he never would continue a correspondence with any person who had used it in addressing him.

It is very easy to conceive what sad consequences may result in affairs of love and matrimony, from careless scribbling, by which ideas may be suggested, directly the reverse of those intended to be expressed by the writer. In