Tickler.—­Up fly a thousand windows from ground-flat to attic, and what an exhibition of night-caps!  Here elderly gentlemen, apparently in their shirts, with head night-gear from Kilmarnock, worthy of Tappitoury’s self,—­behind them their wives—­grandmothers at the least—­poking their white faces, like those of sheeted corpses, over the shoulders of the fathers of their numerous progeny—­there chariest maids, prodigal enough to unveil their beauties to the moon, yet, in their alarm, folding the frills of their chemises across their bosoms—­and lo! yonder the Captain of the Six Feet Club, with his gigantic shadow frightening that pretty damsel back to her couch, and till morning haunting her troubled dreams.  “Fire!  Fire!” “Murder!  Murder!” is the cry—­and there is wrath and wonderment at the absence of the police-officers and engines.  A most multitudinous murder is in process of perpetration there—­but as yet fire is there none; when lo! and hark! the flash and peal of musketry—–­and then the music of the singing slugs slaughtering the Catti, while bouncing up into the air, with Tommy Tortoise clinging to his carcass, the Red Rover yowls wolfishly to the moon, and then descending like lead into the stone area, gives up his nine-ghosts, never to chew cheese more, and dead as a herring.  In mid-air the Phenomenon had let go his hold, and seeing it in vain to oppose the yeomanry, pursues Tabitha, the innocent cause of all this woe, into the coal-cellar, and there, like Paris and Helen,

  “When first entranced, in Cranae’s Isle they lay,
  Lip press’d to lip, and breathed their souls away,”

entitled but not tempted to look at a king, the peerless pair begin to purr and play in that subterranean paradise, forgetful of the pile of cat-corpses that in that catastrophe was heaped half-way up the currant-bushes on the walls, so indiscriminate had been the Strages.  All undreamed of by them the beauty of the rounded moon, now hanging over the city, once more steeped in stillness and in sleep!

* * * * *

FROM THE SPANISH.

  “That much a widowed wife will moan,
  When her old husband’s dead and gone,
    I may conceive it;
  But that she won’t be brisk and gay,
  If another offer the next day: 
    I won’t believe it.

  “That Cloris will repeat to me,
  Of all men, I adore but thee,
    I may conceive it;
  But that she has not often sent
  To fifty more the compliment,
    I won’t believe it.

  “That Celia will accept the choice
  Elected by her parents’ voice,
    I may conceive it;
  But that, as soon as all is over,
  She won’t elect a younger lover,
    I won’t believe it.

  “That when she sees her marriage gown,
  Inez will modestly look down,
    I may conceive it;
  But that she does not from that hour,
  Resolve to amplify her power,
    I won’t believe it.