There was a battle once on a small scale, the only rational duel ever fought, in which a brace of Blabs were sweetly discomfited.  They had succeeded in separating “very friends,” and had arranged a hostile meeting; but, through the intervention of better men, and without their cognisance, the principals entered into explanation, and, finding that they had been misled, mutually agreed to fire at the seconds, who had made the mischief.  One Blab received a bullet in the calf of his leg, and the other a ping close to his whiskers; and then the combatants said that their honour was satisfied, and the party broke up.

Some years ago there lived in our village an individual who was known to us as Brawnging Bill.  Does not the epithet describe the man?  As you pronounce it, does not William’s photograph present itself to your mental eye?  A large, obese, idle hulk of a man (fine old Saxon word, that hulc!) lounging about with his hands in his pockets and a pipe in his mouth; a man who talks at the top of his voice, and laughs the loud laugh which tells the vacant mind, and lies with such volubility that you would think truth was a fool.  Eloquent, didactic, imperious was he in the taproom and by the blacksmith’s forge, in the quoit-yard and in the alley of skittles, and yet, whene’er his tongue led him into trouble, and there was whisper of peril to that fat form of his, at the first utterance of a threat, the first sign of aggressive anger, there was a dissolving view of our Brawnging Bill.

From B to C.—­Whenever the fairer sex enter Parliament (breathes there a man with ears so deaf as to doubt their powers of parlance?) and we have a House of Ladies as well as a House of Lords, I anticipate that among the first measures introduced will be a coercive Bill for Regulating in the Clay Districts the scraping, wiping, and cleaning of men’s boots on their return from the garden or the field.  A sore provocation it must surely be to those who love order and brightness to find slabs of dirt upon their new oil-cloth, Indian mats, and bright encaustic tiles.  Justly may the gentlest spirit chunter and complain while the guilty husband, from his dressing-room hard by, vainly essays to evade his shame by a quotation—­“Would my darling have me come bootless home—­home without boots, and in wet weather, too?” Better to give the real, the only excuse, and say that the soil is so—­no, not adhesive, not sticky, not tenacious, but, to use a word ten thousand times more expressive than these, so clarty.

And do you not remember (on we go, voyaging among the C’s,) a time, a happy time, before you knew what digestion meant, when you delighted to cranch the unripe gooseberry, until you heard the clomp of the paternal tread on the causey, and crouched lest you should catch it, hid to escape a hiding; and how, nevertheless, swift retribution followed upon the track of crime, and you suffered those internal pains, which were vulgarly known as colly-wobbles, and were coddled, in consequence, upon your mother’s knee?