Monthly Magazine.

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TRAVELLING FARE.

If you shut yourself up for some fifty hours or so in a mail-coach, that keeps wheeling along at the rate of ten miles an hour, and changes horses in half a minute, certainly, for obvious reasons, the less you eat and drink the better; and perhaps a few hundred daily drops of laudanum, or equivalent grains of opium, would be advisable, so that the transit from London to Edinburgh might be performed in a phantasma.  But a free agent ought to live well on his travels—­some degrees better, without doubt, than when at home.  People seldom live very well at home.  There is always something requiring to be eaten up, that it may not be lost, which destroys the soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an unexceptionable dinner.  We have detected the same duck through many unprincipled disguises, playing a different part in the farce of domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been expected in one of the most generally despised of the web-footed tribe.  When travelling at one’s own sweet will, one feeds at a different inn every meal; and, except when the coincidence of circumstances is against you, there is an agreeable variety both in the natural and artificial disposition of the dishes.

Blackwood’s Magazine.

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ENGLISH FRUITS.

(Continued from page 231.)

The Currant—­The native place of this useful fruit is not exactly ascertained; nearly allied to the gooseberry, it receives the same treatment, shows the same changes, and may be further improved by the same means; a cross between the white Dutch and red, might be a valuable mule.  It is probable the black also may be induced to sport from that steady character it has hitherto maintained; there are but few domesticated plants but which (like animals) depart, in some way or other, from their native caste.

The Apple.—­It is difficult to find adequate terms to set forth the value of the advantages which have accrued to mankind from the cultivation of this deservedly high-prized fruit.  One circumstance in the history of the apple must not pass unnoticed here, viz., the deterioration of the old sorts, which regaled and were the boast of our forefathers a century ago.  It is the opinion of an eminent orchardist that as the apple is an artificial production, and, as such, has its stages of youth, maturity, and old age, it cannot, in its period of decrepitude, be by any means renovated to its pristine state, either by pruning or cutting down, changing its place, or by transferring its parts to young and vigorous stocks; and that, in whatever station it may be placed, it carries with it the decay and diseases of its parent.  This is the most rational account which has been given