to carve his only ambition. He adopted system about nothing except his victuals. He was enraged if he could not get his favorite slice of beef or part of chicken, and he measured out the pepper, salt, mustard, and vinegar, with the precision of an apothecary weighing drugs. When the meal was concluded, grace pronounced, and his companions were in their ranks and marching out to their sports, I have often laughed to behold Peter sneaking back toward the dining room, stealing affectionate glances at the relics which strewed the table, like the confused wrecks of a hard fought field of battle, and peeping into the hollow bone of the abandoned beef to disengage the luscious marrow with the handle of a tea spoon. The same taste pervaded all his hours. He was never satisfied with the ordinary meals; but at frequent intervals would draw forth from some secret and seemingly inexhaustible source his little tit bits, and you might catch him often with his back turned, swallowing, in solitary delight, the last of some nameless and particular piece of confectionary, which had probably haunted his imagination for the previous hour, until the temptation to despatch it admitted of no longer delay. His desk and his pockets were generally full of crumbs, and the leaves of half his books were stained with tarts, or glued together with little pieces of molasses candy. To feel an interest in his education was out of the question. He loathed his lesson as a labor, and hated his teacher as a tyrant. Fear of disgrace would not drive, nor the hope of approbation influence him.

We were all one day much amused by a scene between him and his instructer. It seems poor Peter had committed one of those heinous offences which swell the criminal records of such literary institutions, and it was necessary to address him before his class.

The venerable man upon whom this duty devolved was of a mild and insinuating disposition, and from the variety and extent of his information, and the unfeigned kindness of his manners, admirably calculated to acquire influence over his pupils. He possessed a kind of simple and natural eloquence, by which he could generally touch the heart as well as enlighten the understanding, and when he flung his hand across the strings of their feelings, the whole system thrilled. But friend

Peter's strings were not fashioned of an over delicate material, and as for the thrilling-heaven save the mark! you might as well have speechified to a rock. Peter's cause came on at the proper time. He was brought out in form, after the invariable fashion of seminaries of learning, and stood in the middle of the floor, in awful and conspicuous solitude. Around was a circle of some eighty or ninety faces, of all kinds, shapes and dimensions, full of enquiry and expectation-some slightly faded into unwonted paleness, from the mischievous representations of their own conscience, some distended with pity, and others wrinkled with mirth.

The master took his seat. The various noises of the

eager crowd died entirely away. There stood Peter with his toes in; his hands-by no means "whiter than monumental alabaster"-twirling the corner of his pocket flap into divers shapes-his head down, and his under lip out. The judge proceeded to the necessary preliminaries, and explained, in a clear style, the nature of his crime. This had little effect. He next appealed to his reason in a forcible manner, and demonstrated, from the intimate connexion which existed between wickedness and misery, that Peter was in a very bad way. Still the offender remained quiet, and appeared thinking about something else. The kind moniter then instituted a comparison between him and his more innocent and happy school fellows. No change yet in the subject. His feelings were next attacked. He had a father, mother, and sister. The disgrace of the transaction was not confined to himself: it extended to them; and, although he did not seem to suffer from remorse, what must be their sorrow? Peter stood all the while as if he had been hewn out of granite; not a feature of his face relaxed from the stupified firmness into which his dull and contented countenance had settled. But when, at length, he heard pronounced against him the awful sentence of bread and water for one or two days, his composure fled. The nerve was touched. His eyes filled with tears. His wide mouth was screwed up into wrinkles of anguish, and as the fragrant dishes, upon which his affections were now vainly placed, rose up in fancy before him, he seemed suffering under a pain as violent, if not as tender, as

that of the lover who bids farewell to the object of all his thoughts.

I should probably have forgotten this little incident, had I not accidentally met friend Peter the other day in the street, and found, that although time has matured him from the boy into manhood, he yet preserves the same character, and has become exactly the kind of man which I had anticipated. I followed him before he recognized me, for some distance, and observed the old peculiarities of his dress and manner. He still walks with his toes in and his head down. His face retains all its ancient stupidity triumphant over the efforts of experience, and his hands, as they hung dangling down by his pocket flaps, looked as if they had scarcely been thoroughly washed since the bread and water tragedy in which he was the principal actor. Some alterations, however, were obvious. The soft complexion and boyish form of youth had disappeared, and in their place, he had a shape resembling Falstaff's, and a nose not unlike that of Bardolph. He knew me after a moment's vacant stare, and invited me, before we had walked the distance of five blocks, to slip into a confectioner's and take a lunch. I was too polite to refuse, or else too curious to discover how much of his old appetite yet remained, so in we went. He drew largely on the long necked cordial bottle, whose oily sweets seemed rather to excite than quench his thirst; and the good woman's eyes sparkled to behold with what rapidity her cream tarts, pound cakes, and other nicknacks disappeared from before him.

I complimented him upon his good health.

"How do you know I am in good health?" he asked, with a bluntness which brought back upon my memory a throng of half faded associations.

"I perceive it by your appetite," answered I, "which is generally an excellent criterion."

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Pshaw, nonsense!" he exclaimed, munching a delicate tart with the energy of a steam mill, and wiping off from his mouth the crumbs and apple with the sleeve of his coat. "Nonsense, I have been out of health these ten years. The doctors have almost given me up. The gout, dyspepsy, and two or three other complaints, allow me no peace. They have prescribed

a course of diet; but that is worse than all the rest. I tried it a little while, however. They gave me thin chicken broth, bread and milk, and roasted apples." Here he uttered a horse laugh, and tossed into his mouth a couple of gingernuts with the motion of a cartman heaving coal into a cellar. "Bread and milk and roasted apples! But it would not do. I got along tolerably well for a day or two; but then I went to see a friend of mine about dinner time. There was a strong smell of roast turkey and onions in the room. am very fond of onions. Up they came. Down I sat. I had eaten a hearty meal, rounded it off with a piece of mince pie, and a couple glasses of brandy and water, before the doctor came into my head at all. I never could go back to bread and milk and roasted apples. I know they would be the death of me.'

I

I parted from him soon, and never saw him again.He fell down, a short time afterward, in a fit of apoplexy, as he was returning from an ordinary where he had been partaking of a luncheon of mock turtle soup.

MUSICAL MANIA.

"Viva la musica!"

ALTHOUGH fortune has blessed me with most of the comforts and luxuries of life, I have been rendered wretched for the last several months, by a circumstance in which you, Messrs. Editors, are in some degree implicated. There can be no egotism in the assertion that I am a plain, honest, industrious man, taught from my earliest years to consider business as a matter of prime importance, and equally well skilled in the arts of making and of keeping money. In my counting house lies all my enjoyment. My reveries are generally upon matters of trade; and, in my opinion, there is no more useless, insignificant, and crazy person, than one who does not seek his principal gratification in the transactions of some sort of profession. I associated with me in the

firm, a few years ago, a young man, for whom I entertained a sincere regard; and who, beside my esteem for him, possessed an additional claim upon my attention, viz. a handsome capital, which proved useful in the concern. You must understand that (as my friends say) one of the peculiarities of my character is a strong dislike to music. Nature has formed me so destitute of "ear," that I can scarcely distinguish one tune from another. It is a mystery to me what pleasure people find in listening to a set of fellows (who ought to be cultivating the earth, or occupied in some other decent employment,) scraping and blowing all sorts of ridiculous noises on all sorts of absurd instruments. A party of friends, the other night, fairly entrapped me into an engagement to accompany them to the theatre, for the purpose of seeing, or rather hearing, Cinderella. For some time I sat with "sad civility," and endured the din, thinking of Pope's lines,

"The dog star rages, nay 'tis past a doubt,

All bedlam or Parnassus are let out."

I do not know whether I should not have soon disappeared, as I was anxious to see that the cash was properly balanced at the store; but, luckily, foreseeing that I should need some rational means of passing away the time, I had wisely filled my coat pockets with peanuts and apples, which I ate with great satisfaction, notwithstanding divers incomprehensible frowns from my neighbors. Indeed, one little gentleman, who, I had been informed, was Count Flippertiflap, after writhing and twisting for some time in apparent agonies, turned suddenly and fiercely upon me, and said in broken English,

"Sair, begair, you shall be turned out of every teatre Francais, wis your dem pig nuts."

"I tell you what, neighbor Flippertiflap, if that's your name," said I, cracking a large nut, "I should like to know what law you can show for preventing a man from eating pea nuts in a free country? You'd better attend to the music, and leave me to my pea nuts 'Every one to his own taste, as the old woman said when she kissed the cow.""