He did so at last, nevertheless, and, catching him in his arms, lifted him entirely from the ground. But the stratagem (if so it may be called) did not succeed, for the innate propelling motion of the leg was so great that it hurried the artist on along with his burden at the same rate as before. He set him therefore down again, and stooping, pressed violently on one of the springs that protruded a little behind. In an instant the unhappy Mynheer Von Wodenblock was off like an arrow, calling out in the most piteous accents" I am lost! I am lost! I am possessed by a devil in the shape of a cork leg! Stop me! for Heaven's sake, stop me! I am breathless, I am fainting! Will nobody shatter my leg to pieces? Turningvort! Turningvort! you have murdered me!" The artist, perplexed and confounded, was hardly in a situation more to be envied. Scarcely knowing what he did, he fell upon his knees, clasped his hands, and with strained and staring eye-balls, looked after the richest merchant in Rotterdam, running with the speed of an enraged buffalo, away along the canal towards Leyden, and bellowing for help as loudly as his exhaustion would permit.

Leyden is more than twenty miles from Rotterdam, but the sun had not yet set, when the Misses Backsneider, who were sitting at their parlour window, immediately opposite the "Golden Lion,"

drinking tea, and nodding to their friends as they passed, saw some one coming at a furious speed along the street. His face was pale as ashes, and he gasped fearfully for breath; but, without turning either to the right or the left, he hurried by at the same rapid rate, and was out of sight almost before they had time to exclaim, "Good gracious! was not that Mynheer Von Wodenblock, the rich merchant of Rotterdam ?"

Next day was Sunday. The inhabitants of Haarlem were all going to church, in their best attire, to say their prayers, and hear their organ, when a figure rushed across the market-place, like an animated corpse, white, blue, cold, and speechless, its eyes fixed, its lips livid, its teeth set, and its hands clenched. Every one cleared a way for it in silent horror; and there was not a person in Haarlem who did not believe it a dead body endowed with the power of motion.

On it went through village and town, towards the great wilds and forests of Germany. Weeks, months, years, elapsed, but at intervals the horrid shape was seen, and still continues to be seen, in various parts of the north of Europe. The clothes, indeed, which he who was once Mynheer Von Wodenblock used to wear, have all mouldered away; the flesh, too, has fallen from his bones, and he is now a skeleton, a skeleton in all but

the cork leg, which still, in its original rotundity

and size, continues attached to the spectral form, a perpetuum mobile, dragging the wearied bones for ever and for ever over the earth!

May all good saints protect us from broken legs and may there never again appear a mechanician like Turningvort, to supply us with cork substitutes of so awful and mysterious a power!

THE TWO SIDES OF THE PICTURE.

"It is to me a treasure of the mind,
A picture in the chamber of the brain
Hung up and framed."

AT that happy period in which a difficult line in Virgil, a long sentence in Livy, or an elliptical expression in Tacitus, constitute the only miseries of life, we attach a very different meaning to the words "joy" and "grief," from that which an intercourse with the world is soon destined to give us. In those days of rarely obscured sunshine, we know of only one spot where any thing like sorrow is to be found,- where the thoughtless but delightful gaiety of childhood is frowned, or scolded, or whipt out of us, where some little foretaste of the miseries of mortality is forced upon our reluctant palates, and where we are taught, that, even in this fair world, there may be such things as "weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth." Where is the boy, who, as he looked on his unintelligible grammar, or greasy Ovid, has not, with all the sincerity of his nature, wished

a thousand and a thousand times, that every one of the ancient philosophers, cramped historians, and most unprofitable poets, had been in the bottom of the Red Sea, when they sat down to write, with so much nonchalance, books which were to cost all the future generations of children so many tears and groans? What does he know, and, if he did, what would his opinion be, of that most melancholy Johnsonian maxim,-" let the future predominate over the present?" Does he not look up into the blue sky, and hear the invisible birds singing in multitudes above him? Does he not look round upon the green fields, and the dark woods, and the majestic mountains, and the glittering streams, and does he not instinctively become a juvenile epicurean, anxious to seize the passing hour, and spend it merrily, content to let the next provide for itself.

There is nothing I recollect better than the loitering, reluctant pace in which I used to move to school. How gladly did I avail myself of every excuse for lengthening the way, and delaying the inevitable hour of confinement! There was not a dog-black, white, or brown-smooth, rough, or shaggy - cowardly, tame, or fierce to whom I did not speak; there was not a sign above a butcher's, baker's, grocer's, or haberdasher's door, that I did not stop to read; there was not a blind ballad-singer, or wooden-legged fiddler, or one