earnings she has kept the bed-ridden old bankrupt in great comfort and secrecy at Pentonville; and furnished her brother's outfit for the Cadetship which her patron, Lord Swigglebiggle, gave her when he was at the Board of Control. I have this information from a friend. To hear Miss Wirt herself, you would fancy that her Papa was a Rothschild, and that the markets of Europe were convulsed when he went into the GAZETTE.

   'Be hanged to your aristocrats!' Ponto said, in some conversation we had regarding the family at Carabas, between whom and the Evergreens there was a feud. 'When I first came into the county—it was the year before Sir John Buff contested in the Blue interest—the Marquis, then Lord St. Michaels, who, of course, was Orange to the core, paid me and Mrs. Ponto such attentions, that I fairly confess I was taken in by the old humbug, and thought that I'd met with a rare neighbour. 'Gad, Sir, we used to get pines from Carabas, and pheasants from Carabas, and it was—"Ponto, when will you come over and shoot?"—and—"Ponto, our pheasants want thinning,"—and my Lady would insist upon her dear Mrs. Ponto coming over to Carabas to sleep, and put me I don't know to what expense for turbans and velvet gowns for my wife's toilette. Well, Sir, the election takes place, and though I was always a Liberal, personal friendship of course induces me to plump for St. Michaels, who comes in at the head of the poll. Next year, Mrs. P. insists upon going to town—with lodgings in Clarges Street at ten pounds a week, with a hired brougham, and new dresses for herself and the girls, and the deuce and all to pay. Our first cards were to Carabas House; my Lady's are returned by a great big flunkey; and I leave you to fancy my poor Betsy's discomfiture as the lodging-house maid took in the cards, and Lady St. Michaels drives away, though she actually saw us at the drawing-room window. Would you believe it, Sir, that though we called four times afterwards, those infernal aristocrats never returned our visit; that though Lady St. Michaels gave nine dinner-parties and four DEJEUNERS that season, she never asked us to one; and that she cut us dead at the Opera, though Betsy was nodding to her the whole night? We wrote to her for tickets for Almack's; she writes to say that all hers were promised; and said, in the presence of Wiggins, her lady's-maid, who told it to Diggs, my wife's woman, that she couldn't conceive how people in our station of life could so far forget themselves as to wish to appear in any such place! Go to Castle Carabas! I'd sooner die than set my foot in the house of that impertinent, insolvent, insolent jackanapes—and I hold him in scorn!' After this, Ponto gave me some private information regarding 

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