in the accident line, fair notice, that if they hash up the old stories with the self-same sauce, as they are wont to do, without substituting the pistol for the razor, and not even changing the Christian name of the young ladies who always drown themselves when parliament is up, we shall take the matter into our own hands, and write a “Chapter of Accidents” that will drive these poor pretenders to the secrets of hemp and rats-bane fairly out of the field.—­Ibid.

* * * * *

AWKWARDNESS.

Man is naturally the most awkward animal that inhales the breath of life.  There is nothing, however simple, which he can perform with the smallest approach to gracefulness or ease.  If he walks,—­he hobbles, or jumps, or limps, or trots, or sidles, or creeps—­but creeping, sidling, limping, hobbling, and jumping, are by no means walking.  If he sits,—­he fidgets, twists his legs under his chair, throws his arm over the back of it, and puts himself into a perspiration, by trying to be at ease.  It is the same in the more complicated operations of life.  Behold that individual on a horse!  See with what persevering alacrity he hobbles up and down from the croupe to the pommel, while his horse goes quietly at an amble of from four to five miles in the hour.  See how his knees, flying like a weaver’s shuttle, from one extremity of the saddle to another, destroy, in a pleasure-ride from Edinburgh to Roslin, the good, gray kerseymeres, which were glittering a day or two ago in Scaife and Willis’s shop.  The horse begins to gallop—­Bless our soul! the gentleman will decidedly roll off.  The reins were never intended to be pulled like a peal of Bob Majors; your head, my friend ought to be on your own shoulders, and not poking out between your charger’s ears; and your horse ought to use its exertions to move on, and not you.  It is a very cold day, you have cantered your two miles, and now you are wiping your brows, as if you had run the distance in half the time on foot.

People think it a mighty easy thing to roll along in a carriage.  Step into this noddy.  That creature in the corner is evidently in a state of such nervous excitement that his body is as immovable as if he had breakfasted on the kitchen poker; every jolt of the vehicle must give him a shake like a battering-ram; do you call this coming in to give yourself a rest?  Poor man, your ribs will ache for this for a month to come!  But the other gentleman opposite:  see how flexible he has rendered his body.  Every time my venerable friend on the coach-box extends his twig with a few yards of twine at the end of it, which he denominates “a whupp,” the suddenness of the accelerated motion makes his great, round head flop from the centre of his short, thick neck, and come with such violence on the unstuffed back, that his hat is sent down upon the bridge of his nose with a vehemence which might well nigh carry it away.  Do you say that man is capable of taking a pleasure ride?  Before he has been bumped three miles, every pull of wind will be jerked out of his body, and by the time he has arrived at Roslin, he will be a dead man.  If that man prospers in the world, he commits suicide the moment he sets up his carriage.