her husband, more grave and careful in his deportment, embrowned, if not wrinkled, by constant toil; the old man, perchance, gone to rest with the thousands of happy and useful beings that leave no trace of their path on earth. I came to the little garden: it was still neat; less decorated than formerly, but containing many a bed of useful plants, and several patches of pretty flowers. As I approached the house I paused with anxiety, but I heard the voices of childhood, and I was encouraged to proceed. A scene of natural beauty was before me. The sun was beginning to throw a deep and yellow lustre over the clouds and the sea; the old man sat upon a plot of raised turf at the well known cottage-door; a net was hung up to dry upon the rock behind him; a dog reposed upon the same bank as its master; one beautiful child, of about three years old, was climbing up her grandfather's shoulders-another, of seven or eight years, perhaps the very girl I had seen in the cradle, was holding a light to the good old man, who was prepared to enjoy his evening pipe. He had evidently been labouring in his business : his heavy boots were yet upon his legs, and he appeared fatigued, though not exhausted. I saw neither the husband nor the wife.

It was not long before I introduced myself to the "ancient" fisherman. He remembered me with some difficulty; but when I brought to his mind the simple incidents of our first meeting, and more especially his daughter's song while I listened at the open casement, he gave me his hand and burst into tears. I soon comprehended his sorrows and his blessings. Mary and her husband were dead! Their two orphan girls were dependent upon their grandsire's protection.

The 'Song of the Fisher's Wife' was true in its forebodings for poor Mary: her brave husband perished in a night of storms. Long did she bear up for the sake of her children; but the worm had eaten into her heart, and she lies in the quiet churchyard, while he has an ocean-grave!

Beautiful, very beautiful, is the habitual intercourse between age and infancy. The affection of those ad

vanced in life for the children of their offspring is generally marked by an intensity of love even beyond that of the nearer parents. The aged have more ideas in common with the very young than the gay, and busy, and ambitious can conceive. To the holy-minded man, who wears his grey locks reverently, the world is presented in its true colours: he knows its wisdom to be folly, and its splendour vanity; he finds a sympathy in the artlessness of childhood; and its ignorance of evil is to him more pleasing than man's imperfect knowledge, and more imperfect practice, of good. But the intercourse of my poor old fisherman with his two most dear orphans, was even of a higher order. He forgot his age, and he toiled for them; he laid aside his cares, and he played with them; he corrected the roughness of his habits, and he nursed them with all sweet and tender offices. His fears lest they should be dependent upon strangers, or upon public support, gave a new spring to his existence. He lived his manhood over again, in all careful occupations; and his hours of rest were all spent with his beloved children in his bosom.

Excellent old man! the blessing of Heaven shall be thy exceeding great reward; and when thou art taken from thy abode of labour and love to have thy virtue made perfect, thou shalt feel, at the moment of parting, a deep and holy assurance that the same Providence which gave thee the will and the ability to protect the infancy of thy orphans shall cherish and uphold them through the rough ways of the world, when thou shalt be no longer their protector.

THE WAITS.

WE have seen "the latter end of a sea-coal fire"-Dame Quickly's notion of the perfection of enjoyment. The snow lies hard upon the ground-icy. The noise of the streets is almost hushed, save that the cabman's whip is

occasionally heard urging his jaded horse over the slippery causeway. We creep to bed, and, looking out into the cold, as if to give us a greater feeling of comfort in the warmth within, see the gas-lights shining upon the bright pavement, and, perhaps, give one sigh for poor wretched humanity as some shivering wanderer creeps along to no home, or some one of the most wretched nestles in a sheltering doorway to be questioned or disturbed by the inflexible police watcher. It is long past midnight. We are soon in our first sleep; and the dream comes which is to throw its veil over the realities of the day struggle through which we have passed. The dream gradually slides into a vague sense of delight. We lie in a pleasant sunshine, by some gushing spring; or the neverceasing murmur of leafy woods is around us; or there is a harmony of birds in the air, a chorus, and not a song; or some sound of instrumental melody is in the distance, some faintly remembered air of our childhood that comes unbidden into the mind, more lovely in its indistinctness. Gradually the plash of dripping waters, and the whispering of the breeze among the leaves, and the song of birds, and the hum of many instruments, blend into one more definite harmony, and we recognise the tune, which is familiar to us, for we are waking. And then we hear real music, soft and distant; and we listen, and the notes can be followed; and presently the sound is almost under our window; and we fancy we never heard sweeter strains; and we recollect, during these tender, and, perhaps, solemn chords, the honied words, themselves music,

"Soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony."

But anon, interposes some discordant jig; and then we know that have been awakened by the WAITS.

In the times when minstrelsy was not quite so much a matter of sixpences as in these days, there were enthusiastic people who made the watches of the night melodious, even though snow was upon the ground; and there were good prosaic people who abused them then as

C

much as the poor Waits sometimes get abused now. These were the days of serenaders, and England, despite of its climate, was once a serenading country. Old Alexander Barclay, in his 'Ship of Fools,' published in 1508, describes to us "the vagabonds" whose enormity is so great,

"That by no means can they abide, ne dwell,

Within their houses, but out they need must go;
More wildly wandering than either buck or doe,—
Some with their harps, another with their lute,
Another with his bagpipe, or a foolish flute."

But he is especially wrath against the winter minstrels :

"But yet moreover these fools are so unwise,
That in cold winter they use the same madness;
When all the houses are lade with snow and ice,
O, madmen amased, unstable, and witless!
What pleasure take you in this your foolishness?
What joy have ye to wander thus by night?
Save that ill doers alway hate the light?"

The "fools had the uncommon folly to do all this for nothing. But in a century the aspect of things was changed. The “madmen ” divided themselves into sects -those who paid, and those who received pay; and the more sensible class came to be called Waits-literally, Watchers. If we may judge from the following passage in Beaumont and Fletcher ( The Captain,' Act ii., Sc. 2), the performances of the unpaid were not entirely welcome to delicate ears :

"Fab. The touch is excellent; let's be attentive. Jac. Hark! are the WAITS abroad?

Fab. Be softer, prithee;

'Tis private music.

Jac. What a din it makes!

I'd rather hear a Jew's trump than these lutes;
They cry like school-boys."

The Waits, according to the same authority, had their dwellings in the land of play-houses and bear-gardens, and other nuisances of the sober citizens; and they were

not more remarkable than the "private music' for the charms of their serenadings :—

"Citizen. Ay, Ned, but this is scurvy music! I think he has got me the Waits of Southwark.".

The Waits had, however, been long before a part of city pageantry. But as the age grew more literal and mechanical,―as music went out with poetry, when the cultivation of what was somewhat too emphatically called the useful became the fashion,-the Waits lost their metropolitan honours and abiding-place; and came at last to be only heard at Christmas. They retired into the country. The last trace we can find of them, as folks for all weathers, is at Nottingham, in 1710. The 'Tatler' (No. 222) thus writes :

"Whereas, by letters from Nottingham, we have advice that the young ladies of that place complain for want of sleep, by reason of certain riotous lovers, who for this last summer have very much infested the streets of that eminent city with violins and bass-viols, between the hours of twelve and four in the morning." Isaac Bickerstaff adds, that the same evil has been complained of" in most of the polite towns of this island." The cause of the nuisance he ascribes to the influence of the

tender passion. "For as the custom prevails at present, there is scarce a young man of any fashion in a corporation who does not make love with the Town Music. The Waits often help him through his courtship." The censor concludes," that a man might as well serenade in Greenland as in our region." But he gives a more sensible reason for the actual decay of serenading, and

its unsuitableness to England. "In Italy," he says, "nothing is more frequent than to hear a cobler working to an opera tune; but, on the contrary, our honest countrymen have so little an inclination to music, that they seldom begin to sing till they are drunk." It is strange that a century should have made such a difference in the manners of England. In Elizabeth's reign we were a musical people; in Anne's a drunken people. Moralists and legislators had chased away the lute, but they left the gin; and so madrigals were thrust out by