if I was traducing a favourite menial:  however, I went round with her, unfortunately proving the delinquency by exhibiting several handsome volumes with middle leaves torn out!—­Once more, in the prehistoric days when we sported with loose powder and shot and paper wadding, I was a guest for some days in September with James Maclaren at Ticehurst, and recollect his horror at finding that the luncheon sandwiches were wrapped in some of his most precious MSS.—­for he was writing a treatise on finance, and these leaves were covered with calculations—­and that his shooting-party were ramming down their charges with the recorded labour of his brains!  It was at Maclaren’s that I once tasted squirrel; his woods were infested with the pretty creatures, which the keeper shot, and after keeping the skin gave the carcase to the cook:  it tasted like very nutty rabbit:  but I protested it was a greater outrage than lark-pudding, which I had recently seen at the Judges’ Sentence dinner at Newgate, and said it was a shame to eat the sweet songsters.  At Maclaren’s I learnt the origin of “high” as applied to eatables.  His game-larder was a tower of many bars, the lowest containing a to-day’s shooting, the next yesterday’s, and so forth, always moving up; hence the stalest were at the top, and so most serviceable as least fresh.  Trench on words would approve this reason for “high” game.

    11. Providence.

    I.

    “Lo! we are led; we are guided and guarded
      Carefully, kindly, by night and by day;
    Punish’d belike, or haply rewarded,
      As we go wrong or go right on the way;
    Wisdom and Mercy, twin angels of kindness,
      Take by both hands the child lost in the night,
    Leading him safely, in spite of his blindness,
      Guiding him well through the dark to the light.

    II.

    “All things are ordered,—­the least as the greatest;
      Motes have their orbits as fixt as a star,—­
    And thou may’st mark, if humbly thou waitest,
      Providence working in all things that are: 
    Nothing shall fail in its ultimate object,
      Good must outwrestle all evil at last;
    God is the King, and creation His subject,
      And the great future shall ransom the past.

    III.

    “Ay, and this present,—­perplexing, degrading—­
      None may despise it as futile or worse;
    Swift as it flieth, dissolving and fading,
      ’Tis the wing’d seed of some blessing or curse. 
    Telescope, microscope,—­which hath most wonder? 
      Infinite great, or as infinite small? 
    Musical silence, or world-splitting thunder?—­
      He that made all things inhabits them all.

    IV.