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 buckskin gloves stretched out on their trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; 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.

   '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.'

   We had the fish, which, as the kind reader may remember, I had brought down in a delicate attention to Mrs. Ponto, to variegate the repast of next day; and cod and oyster-sauce, twice laid, salt cod and scolloped oysters, formed parts of the bill of fare until I began to fancy that the Ponto family, like our late revered monarch George II., had a fancy for stale fish. And about this time, the pig being consumed, we began upon a sheep.

   But how shall I forget the solemn splendour of a second course, which was served up in great state by Stripes in a silver dish and cove; a napkin round his dirty thumbs; and consisted of a landrail, not much bigger than a corpulent sparrow.

   'My love, will you take any game?' says Ponto, with prodigious gravity; and stuck his fork into that little mouthful of an island in the silver sea. Stripes, too, at intervals, dribbled out the Marsala with a solemnity which would have done honour to a Duke's butler. The Bamnecide's dinner to Shacabac was only one degree removed from these solemn banquets.

   As there were plenty of pretty country places close by; a comfortable country town, 

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