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out of a great mess in the case of the Squabashes, that he was no longer a bear, but a valorous bull again! Being relieved from anxiety upon this score, he rushes into room bouble X., where the Great North Circumbendibus line is under consideration.

He arrives apparently in the nick of time. There is evidently a hitch. Committee look as grave as Mr. Calcraft on the day of an execution,-counsel argue and argue, try to puzzle them, try to frighten them, to cajole them-anything. Bystanders in a ferment. Heads peering forward in a huge red mass; a whole phalanx of hats elevated aloft on sticks.

"A datum error! Is it indeed a datum error? Will it be fatal to the bill?"

"They can hardly get over it, I should think. Committee seem to think so."

Theophilus waited for no more. "Sell- 500 Great North Circumbendibus;" he writes on a card, hands it to a jockey ready waiting an horseback, who starts off like a flash of lightning for the city. He returns to the room, snapping his fingers, and rubbing his hair all round his head like a man with a headache; "there's a one and a half operation to a certainty," he exclaims.

He has hardly entered the room, however, when he perceives that the discussion is still going on, and with somewhat a different complexion. Mr. Plumline, the engineer, proves that it is a surface error, and not a datum error; and after some communing the committee overrule all the apprehended fatal objections.

How differently does an event affect one according to circumstances. Theophilus saw none but smiling faces around him; very few, however, of the other sort. Agents, counsel, witnesses, all pleased,— triumphant; whilst he, poor animal of a bear, had nothing else to do but to scamper into the city and undo all he had done on the best terms he could. On jumping into a cab he had the satisfaction of seeing a man on horseback start off at full tear, who would of course anticipate him in the market.

Well, by dint of bullying and bribing the cabman he gets into the city in seventeen minutes and a half, and finds himself in the little, dark, unfurnished upper apartment, dignified by the title of office by its occupant Mr. Popps.

"Popps," he cried, "I have made a sad mistake! Buy back all those Direct Circumbendibuses."

"Dear me! I thought you had made some mistake. They went down thirty shillings ten minutes before your express arrived. However, I sold them, as you left me no option, at

"Well, don't wait for that: go, buy them back-close them and have done with them."

Off went Popps, and in a few minutes returned.

"I've closed them at four and four and a quarter; sold them at three and two and a half. The clerk will make you out the contracts immediately. Very annoying affair certainly;" and he proceeded then to other business, till another customer called him away, and sent him again into "the House."

Meantime Theophilus chewed the cud of disappointment in silence, watching the operations of the juvenile clerk, who with wonderful expedition made out the following gratifying document:

"Theophilus Smith, Esq.

"Sold for you, for the 15th,

300 Direct Circumbendibuses, 2 paid, 3 pm.

£1,650 Os.

200

Ditto

2 pm.

1,000 0

Deduct Commission

2,650 O 62 10

£2,587 10

"Bought for you,

ditto

200 Direct Circumbendibuses, 21 paid, 4 pm. 300

at 44 pm.

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The clerk was too genteel to draw the balance; but Theophilus saw at a glance that it was somewhere between six hundred and seven hundred pounds for his afternoon's exertions. He began now to think affairs looked serious, and had only the Squabashes to depend upon as his sheet anchor.

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Why, what's the matter with the Squabashes?" said Popps, as he came into the room, and putting down his hat walked to the fatal desk; "they are throwing them in by cart-loads. It's well you got out of yours, Mr. Smith."

The little clerk, if he had touched Theophilus with the tip of his pen, might have felled him to the ground.

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Squabashes! I'm not out of them—that is, I'm in them again! For God's sake, go and see what you can do for me. Sell six hundred of them at any price, and let me quit this infernal city." He clenched his hand, smote the fatal desk, and for the first time Theophilus seemed really dejected. His pluck hitherto had been the admiration of the whole room.

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Hurrah! Squabashes dished!" exclaimed a huge vulgar man, in a green short-cut coat. Preamble not proved! I've been bearing them through thick and thin. They're down to par to a quarter. I make two hundred pounds!"

"And I," thought Theophilus, "lose near two thousand!"

He could not stop to face Popps on his return from "the House." He resolved to see him never more. He walked deliberately from the room, with a quiet "good-bye," which he inwardly intended to be a final one-jumped into a cab, and drove to his mother's house in Square.

How natural it is for us to run to one's mother when all the rest of the world treats us unkindly. Theophilus did so; not with the intention of whining about his troubles, or seeking for means to meet them. He maintained a cheerful countenance throughout the evening; cast up his losses mentally with stoical fortitude; the next day sold out stock to pay the amount; and almost laughing at his folly, resolved to economize what estate he had left, and to "work the oracle" no more. May he have fortitude to keep so good a resolution.

THOM, THE WEAVER POET *.

EVERY now and again, at distant and fitful periods, the gloomy regions of labour and lowliness have sent up their meteor blaze into the wide firmament, as if to warn the endowed and privileged world that they still have life and thought amongst them; and to give encouragement and consolation to suffering brethren far and wide. Every now and again, mind, the ever-living principle of man has forced its way in vigour amost unimpaired from amidst prostrate and squalid masses in which all energy and enjoyment physical had long since ceased to exist. Tis then the moral of our being triumphs over the material;'tis then that truth heaven-pinioned soars loftily and free above the sordid and unkind world, proclaiming words of hope to the dejected-of terror to the thoughtless.

Poeta nascitur non fit; in other words, poetry is the work of nature, not of art. Poetry-true poetry we mean-we talk not of your namby-pamby boarding-school rhymesters-true poetry is truth itself, rushing into being in the beauty of symmetry. Educated truth may be tutored into prose; but heaven-born, untutored truth must march in the dignity of verse.

Ye who, under the inspiration of champagne, ice-creams, and Weippert's band, laboriously emit " Sonnets to Julia," and "Lines to Julia's Lap-dog," or her " Fan ;" and ye who "murder sleep" and the Queen's English with vile inventions concocted under the more potent influence of "cold without "-listen with admiration to the weaver of Inverury, who working midst the din and bustle of a factory, and starving with a wife and four children upon five shillings a week, naïvely tells us ;—" I have had, ever since I remember, an irrepressible tendency to write verses." William Thom's " 'tendency to write verses" originated in a tendency to think upon his own lot, and that of his fellow men around him, and with continual thinking and turning over in his mind, the rough idea, like the pebble on the sea-shore, was rounded and polished into the smoothness of verse.

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The earliest production of this kind, a melancholy little ditty "had its foundation in one of those luckless doings which ever and aye follow misguided attachments, and," he adds, "in our abode of freedom these were almost the only kind of attachments known; so they were all on the wrong side of durability and happiness." Thom, by the way, in his "Recollections," gives a sad and humiliating account of the degrading influences, moral and physical, of the factory system; for "they know little of the matter," he says, "who know only the physical evils bred in factories." As it is not our purpose to enter upon this difficult and painful subject at the present moment, we must pass over the details; but one passage gives so terrible a summary of the whole, and affords such a mystical key to the harrassing reflections which must have crowded upon the author's mind, when he felt "the irresistible tendency to write verses," that we cannot omit it.

"Between three and four hundred male and female workers were

• Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver. By William Thom, of Inverury. Second Edition, with Additions. 1845.

promiscuously distributed over the works; the distinctive character of all sunk away. Man became less manly, woman unlovely and rude. Many of these married, some pairs seemed happy, they were few, and left the work whenever they could get webs and looms outside. Vacancies daily made were daily filled-often by queer enough people, and from all parts, none too coarse for using. He who had never sought a better sight than an unwatched pocket-he, trained to the loom six months in Bridewell, came forth a journeyman weaver, and lo! his precious experiences were infused into the common moral puddle, and in due time did its work-became a fixture,-another pot of poison sunken in the common well, and drink they must. The poorest poor, the uneducated, the untrained poor, drank of it; yet, the wise and wellprovided will often condemn, without one pitying look, nor seek to see that strong link between crime and cause!

Throughout his writings, Thom evidences that these early pictures of misery have been the prevailing theme of his reflections, and his object appears to be all along to awaken in all classes a proper sympathy for one another.

"I have long had a notion," he says, "that many of the heartburnings that run through the social whole, spring not so much from the distinctiveness of classes, as from their mutual ignorance of each other. The miserably rich look on the miserably poor with distrust and dread, scarcely giving them credit for sensibility sufficient to feel their own sorrows. That is ignorance with its gilded side. The poor, in turn, foster a hatred of the wealthy as a sole inheritance-look on grandeur as their natural enemy, and bend to the rich man's rule in gall and bleeding scorn. Shallows on the one side, and demagogues on the other, are the portions that come oftenest in contact. These are the luckless things that skirt the great divisions, exchanging all that is offensive therein. Man know thyself,' should be written on the right hand; on the left, Men know each other.""

Such were the reflections which sprang up, and grew, and strengthened in Thom's mind, as he surveyed his own miserable and struggling existence, and that of his fellow men around him. The history of that existence, of those struggles, those trials, and bitter griefs, is given with touching but simple eloquence, in the "Recollections" which form the first portion of the little volume. So striking, indeed, are the pictures he has brought before us-so startling and convincing the revelations of the heart's workings which they contain, that we could fain linger over them to the neglect of the poems which follow, and which, by bringing this author into notice, gave occasion for the telling of his story, which, might otherwise have gone down with him untold to a pauper's grave. But as far as this article is concerned we must not trust ourselves further upon this branch of the subject— the personal history of the man must be left to his own telling; to paraphrase it, or to extract incidents from it, would be to destroy the breathing beauty of a thing of life. Let us rather turn to "the rhymes," and wonder that on a soil so rugged and unkind, watered only with bitter tears, such sweet and healthy flowers of thought should spring into being. Let us thank the Aberdeen Journal, which first printed some of these modest productions, and let us do honour to the head and heart of Gordon of Knockespock, who at once appreciated

the genius which could produce them, and holding out the hand of liberality and encouragement, brought the author and his works before the world in the form in which we now find them.

William Thom, as all that we have already quoted of him would prepare one to believe, is especially remarkable for feeling and fancy; the earliest and the most potent ingredients of poetry. Of imagry and invention he pretends to little. He writes of nature as he finds her; he sings of the heart before it has become contaminated by the perfumed incense of the heartless. Herein the secret of the refreshing atmosphere of his rustic pictures, herein the telling influence of his artless lays of disappointed affection.

We give a couple of specimens; and first of his powers of fancy, from the poem entitled "Old Father Frost and his Family:"

"Grim father Frost, he hath children twain,
The cloud-born daughters of Lady Rain;
The elder, a coquettish pattering thing,

Would woo you in winter and pelt you in spring;
At times you might scarce feel her feathery fall,
Anon she will beard you with icicle ball;

When the warrings of heaven roll higher and higher,
She, coward-like, flees from the conflict of fire-
Yet heightens the havoc, for her feeble power,
Tho' scatheless the oak, how it fells the frail flower!
And the bud of the berry, the bloom of the bean,
Are founder'd to earth by the merciless quean;
E'en the stout stems of summer full often must quail
To this rattling, brattling, head-breaking hail."

Then the contrast which follows:-

"You know her meek sister? Oh, soft is the fall
Of her fairy footsteps on hut and on hall!
To hide the old father's bleak doings below,
In pity she cometh, the minist'ring snow.
With her mantle she covers the shelterless trees,
As they groan to the howl of the Borean breeze;
And baffles the search of the subtle wind,
Guarding each crevice, lest it should find
Its moaning way to the fireless fold

Of the trembling young and the weeping old.
When through her white bosom the daisy appears,

She greets the fair stranger with motherly tears!" &c.

In the department of fancy also, we may point with admiration to the whole of the two poems of "The Blind Boy's Pranks," (too long for insertion, and too didactic for extract,) which were the first pieces which brought the author into notice; to his lines "To My Flute," also, which are as ingenious and perfect of their kind as anything from the best masters in the art. În the way of feeling, of deep potent feeling, we may point to "The Mother's Maniac Dream," "The Overgate Orphan," The Mitherless Bairn," Oh, that my Love was so easily won,' ""The Last Tryst," and indeed half the pieces in the book. We are sorely puzzled out of them all to make a selection, but have determined at length upon adopting the following lines, which, few as they are, unfold a whole life of patient suffering and heroic struggle:

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