unoffended. We retain, and improve upon the music, the singing, and the dancing of their merry-makings: the sunshine, the scenery, and the flowers we still worship; but their maskings and their mummerings we leave to sleep in oblivion. We are still worshippers at the same shrine, though we have hurled down the idols that disfigured the fair temple of Nature.

To a thinking man, the great change which has taken place in our holiday amusements are easily accounted for; place them side by side with the progress made in other matters, and there is nothing left for wonderment. The drama alone appears to have degenerated, as music lectures and literary associations have increased. Zoological and botanical gardens and museums, such as we have now, were unknown to our forefathers; yet amid so much light and knowledge, Tom Thumb has still his admirers, neither are the Giant or Fat Boy entirely neglected.

Nature will ever have her worshippers, while Spring putteth forth her flowers, and Summer clotheth the woods in her heart-cheering livery of green. Old manners and rude customs will only be remembered by the pages of the historian and the poet, to be pored over and pondered upon, as we now gaze upon those rare fossil remains, in which we trace the links of an old and forgotten age. The Twenty-ninth of May, the Restoration of King Charles the Second, his hiding in the oak, and the holidays that celebrated such events, are minor matters of history, when compared to the mighty convulsions which preceded them. There are but few places where "Oak-apple Day" is kept as an holiday now, every few years will see the number less, and by-and-by the very name of it will be forgotten. It might be, that, in such localities as we have described,

where the weight of Cromwell's arm was long felt after the blow had been struck; where his men had been quartered, and he in person had been heard to command, while men trembled and obeyed him; that a few of the old families who had fled the neighbourhood, would, on their return at the Restoration, endeavour to keep alive the remembrance of an event which again replaced them in their old ances tral halls and that only in places thus restored to their ancient occupants, would be celebrated the Twenty-ninth of May.

What aching hearts have bent within those walls,
What eyes have in those ancient chambers wept,
What death-bed scenes, and unrevealed confessions
Have died upon the air as soon as breathed:
'Twould make a gloomy volume!"

OLD PLAY.

THERE is an old moated manor-house still standing at the head of a long straggling village, which we shall call Morton, as we wish not the locality to be known. A wide marsh spreads for miles beside the hamlet; and, saving the wooden fence which runs along the low sandy highroad, this vast arena of rich grazing land is unmarked by any

enclosure, unless the wide rapid sluices, which empty themselves into the distant river (and are unseen from the highway), can be called boundaries; for these, and the low grey stones which the summer grass overtops, are the only landmarks.

The manor-house stands on "made land;" part of which was, no doubt, thrown out of the enormous moat, and the remainder brought from an ancient clay pit still seen on the side of a neighbouring hill. An old oak or two (the only trees near at hand) mark the site of an ancient rampart, which leads up from a high grassy mound, where the lodge, or outer tower, is supposed to have stood; these throw their leafless arms across the low embankment, which stretches to the very edge of the moat. An arch of brickwork, of modern date, spans over the moat before a mouldering gate, and in former times faced the drawbridge.

The manor-house is built in the ancient English style which marks the period of Richard the Third, though by some considered much older. It stood a stout siege during the civil wars, and the room is still pointed out in which the ill-fated Charles slept. It seems heavy with overhanging gables, one projecting above the other, and weighty stone windows, which look as if they would bear down the very walls while old heads hang out, and grin on you from every angle; and these, the ignorant country people say, were once alive—were real wizards and witches (nailed up like birds and vermin on a barn-wall); placed there at the time of the Reformation, and sprinkled with some mysterious liquid which changed them into stone.

There are no written records to tell of the changes which that weather-beaten building has witnessed; for the church, nearly two centuries ago, was a heap of ruins, and

all the monuments it contained perished, when the edifice was razed to the ground. There is now no church nearer than a mile-a small modern meeting-house is the only place of worship in this ancient village. All that can be gathered is from tradition: the villagers have heard their forefathers talk of old Sir Hubert, who pawned farm and field, and with fifty horsemen, equipped at his own expense, sallied out and fought under the banner of King Charles; that, leaving two-thirds of his followers dead on the field, he returned to his old manor-house with a sabre cut on his cheek, and the loss of his left hand; that he kept open house, caroused with the remainder of his soldiers, drunk acre after acre, until neither meadow nor mansion were left -nothing saving the ancient manor-house, which he willed to his sister; that he was too poor to arouse the cupidity of Cromwell, or had some friend at the back of the stern Protector. The sister had lost her husband at Marston Moor, died at an old age, and left a daughter, whose husband, unlike his ancestors, joined the Pretender, and fell in battle. Then came the last of the race (whose father perished in the rebellion)—the old Lady Morton, whose name our grandmothers never uttered without looking pale. She turned the old manor-house into a school for young ladies; but whether she was a true descendant from the stout old royalist, Sir Hubert, is not known. There are rumours of the rightful heirs dying abroad in a nunnery; of the cruel old nurse installing her own child in the manorhouse, and under the title of Lady Morton; and of the few ancient families who still survived in the neighbourhood intrusting the education of their daughters to her care. These, be it remembered, were the days when parents commanded, and children trembled and obeyed; when their