girl sent to the shop by the rejected mother: 'he couldn't bear to see poor children wanting anything.'

"Pugwash had another unprofitable weakness. He was fond of what he called Nature, though in his dim close shop he could give her but a stifling welcome. Nevertheless he had the earliest primroses on his counter,-'they threw,' he said, 'such a nice light about the place.' A sly, knavish customer presented Isaac with a pot of polyanthuses; and won by the flowery gift, Pugwash gave the donor ruinous credit. The man with wall-flowers regularly stopped at Isaac's shop, and for only sixpence Pugwash would tell his wife he had made the place a Paradise. 'If we can't go to Nature, Sally, isn't it a pleasant thing to be able to bring Nature to us? Whereupon Mrs. Pugwash would declare that a man with at least three children to provide for had no need to talk of Nature. Nevertheless, the flower-man made his weekly call. Though at many a house the penny could not every week be spared to buy a hint, a look of Nature for the darkened dwellers, Isaac, despite of Mrs. Pugwash, always purchased. is a common thing, an old familiar cry," said the Hermit, "to see the poor man's florist, to hear his loud-voiced invitation to take his nosegays, his penny roots; and yet is it a call, a conjuration of the heart of man overlabored and desponding - walled in by the gloom of a town-divorced from the fields and their sweet healthful influences-almost shut out from the sky that reeks in vapor over him;-it is a call that tells him there are things of the earth besides food and covering to live for; and that God in his great bounty hath made them for all men. Is it not so?" asked the Hermit.

It

"Most certainly," we answered: "it would be the very sinfulness of avarice to think otherwise."

"Why, sir," said the Hermit benevolently smiling, "thus considered, the loud-lunged city bawler of roots and flowers becomes a high benevolence, a peripatetic priest of Nature. Adown dark lanes and miry alleys he takes sweet remembrances-touching records of the loveliness of earth, that with their bright looks and balmy odors cheer and uplift the dumpish heart of man; that make his soul stir within him; and acknowledge the beautiful. The penny, the ill-spared penny-for it would buy a wheaten roll-the poor housewife pays for a root of primrose, is her offering to the hopeful loveliness of Nature; is her testimony of the soul struggling with the blighting, crushing circumstance

of sordid earth, and sometimes yearning towards earth's sweetest aspects. Amidst the violence, the coarseness, and the suffering that may surround and defile the wretched, there must be moments when the heart escapes, craving for the innocent and lovely; when the soul makes for itself even of a flower a comfort and a refuge."

The Hermit paused a moment, and then in blither voice resumed. "But I have strayed a little from the history of our small tradesman Pugwash. Well, sir, Isaac for some three or four years kept on his old way, his wife still prophesying in loud and louder voice the inevitable workhouse. He would so think and

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talk of Nature when he should mind his shop; he would so often snatch a holiday to lose it in the fields, when he should take stock and balance his books. What was worse, he every week lost more and more by bad money. With no more sense than a buzzard, as Mrs. Pugwash said, for a good shilling, he was the victim of those laborious folks who make their money, with a fine independence of the State, out of their own materials. It seemed the common compact of a host of coiners to put off their base-born offspring upon Isaac Pugwash; who, it must be confessed, bore the loss and the indignity like a Christian martyr. At last, however, the spirit of the man was stung. A guineaPugwash believed, of statute gold-was found to be of little less value than a brass button. Mrs. Pugwash clamored and screamed as though a besieging foe was in her house; and Pugwash himself felt that further patience would be pusillanimity. Whereupon, sir, what think you Isaac did? Why, he suffered himself to be driven by the voice and vehemence of his wife to a conjurer, who in a neighboring attic was a sidereal go-between to the neighborhood-a vender of intelligence from the stars to all who sought and duly fee'd him. This magician would declare to Pugwash the whereabouts of the felon coiner, and the thought was anodyne to the hurt mind of Isaac's wife-the knave would be law-throttled.

"With sad indignant spirit did Isaac Pugwash seek Father Lotus; for so, sir, was the conjurer called. He was none of your common wizards. Oh no! he left it to the mere quack-salvers and mountebanks of his craft to take upon them a haggard solemnity of look, and to drop monosyllables heavy as bullets upon the ear of the questioner. The mighty and magnificent hocuspocus of twelvepenny magicians was scorned by Lotus. There

was nothing in his look or manner that showed him the worse for keeping company with spirits; on the contrary, perhaps the privileges he enjoyed of them served to make him only the more blithe and jocund. He might have passed for a gentleman at once easy and cunning in the law; his sole knowledge, that of labyrinthine sentences made expressly to wind poor commonsense on parchment. He had an eye like a snake, a constant smile upon his lip, a cheek colored like an apple, and an activity of movement wide away from the solemnity of the conjurer. He was a small, eel-figured man of about sixty, dressed in glossy black, with silver buckles and flowing periwig. It was impossible not to have a better opinion of sprites and demons, seeing that so nice, so polished a gentleman was their especial pet. And then, his attic had no mystic circle, no curtain of black, no death's-head, no mummy of apocryphal dragon,-the vulgar catchpennies of fortune-telling trader. There was not even a pack of cards to elevate the soul of man into the regions of the mystic world. No, the room was plainly yet comfortably set out. Father Lotus reposed in an easy-chair, nursing a snow-white cat upon his knee; now tenderly patting the creature with one hand, and now turning over a little Hebrew volume with the other. If a man wished to have dealings with sorry demons, could he desire a nicer little gentleman than Father Lotus to make the acquaintance for him? In few words Isaac Pugwash told his story to the smiling magician. He had, amongst much other bad money, taken a counterfeit guinea: could Father Lotus discover the evil-doer?

"Yes, yes, yes,' said Lotus, smiling, 'of course-to be sure; but that will do but little: in your present state- But let me look at your tongue.' Pugwash obediently thrust the organ forth. 'Yes, yes, as I thought. Twill do you no good to hang the rogue; none at all. What we must do is this, we must cure you of the disease.'

"Disease!' cried Pugwash. 'Bating the loss of my money, I was never better in all my days.'

་ ( Ha! my poor man,' said Lotus, 'it is the benevolence of nature, that she often goes on quietly breaking us up, ourselves knowing no more of the mischief than a girl's doll when the girl rips up its seams. Your malady is of the perceptive organs. Leave you alone and you'll sink to the condition of a baboon.' (( ( God bless me!' cried Pugwash.

"A jackass with sense to choose a thistle from a toadstool will be a reasoning creature to you! for consider, my poor soul,' said Lotus in a compassionate voice,-'in this world of tribulation we inhabit, consider what a benighted nincompoop is man, if he cannot elect a good shilling from a bad one.'

"I have not a sharp eye for money,' said Pugwash modestly. 'It's a gift, sir; I'm assured it's a gift.'

«A sharp eye! an eye of horn,' said Lotus. 'Never mind, I can remedy all that; I can restore you to the world and to yourself. The greatest physicians, the wisest philosophers, have in the profundity of their wisdom made money the test of wit. A man is believed mad; he is a very rich man, and his heir has very good reason to believe him lunatic: whereupon the heir, the madman's careful friend, calls about the sufferer a company of wizards to sit in judgment on the suspected brain, and report a verdict thereupon. Well, ninety-nine times out of the hundred, what is the first question put as test of reason? Why, a question of money. The physician, laying certain pieces of current coin in his palm, asks of the patient their several value. If he answer truly, why truly there is hope; but if he stammer or falter at the coin, the verdict runs, and wisely runs, mad-incapably mad.'

"I'm not so bad as that,' said Pugwash, a little alarmed. "Don't say how you are- it's presumption in any man,' cried Lotus. 'Nevertheless, be as you may, I'll cure you if you'll give attention to my remedy.'

«I'll give my whole soul to it,' exclaimed Pugwash.

«Very good, very good; I like your earnestness: but I don't want all your soul,' said Father Lotus smiling,-'I want only part of it; that, if you confide in me, I can take from you with no danger,—ay, with less peril than the pricking of a whitlow. Now then, for examination. Now to have a good stare at this soul of yours.' Here Father Lotus gently removed the white cat from his knee,- for he had been patting her all the time he talked, and turned full round upon Pugwash. Turn out your breeches pockets,' said Lotus; and the tractable Pugwash immediately displayed the linings. So!' cried Lotus, looking narrowly at the brown holland whereof they were made, 'very bad indeed; very bad: never knew a soul in a worse state in all my life.'

"Pugwash looked at his pockets, and then at the conjurer; he was about to speak, but the fixed, earnest look of Father Lotus held him in respectful silence.

"Yes, yes,' said the wizard, still eying the brown holland, 'I can see it all: a vagabond soul; a soul wandering here and there, like a pauper without a settlement; a ragamuffin soul.'

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"Pugwash found confidence and breath. Was there ever such a joke?' he cried: 'know a man's soul by the linings of his breeches pockets!' and Pugwash laughed, albeit uncom fortably.

"Father Lotus looked at the man with philosophic compassion. 'Ha, my good friend!' he said, 'that all comes of your ignorance of moral anatomy.'

"Well, but, Father Lotus

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"Peace!' said the wizard, 'and answer me. You'd have this soul of yours cured?'

"If there's anything the matter with it,' answered Pugwash. 'Though not of any conceit I speak it, yet I think it as sweet and as healthy a soul as the souls of my neighbors. I never did wrong to anybody.'

"Pooh!' cried Father Lotus.

"I never denied credit to the hungry,' continued Pugwash. "Fiddle-de-dee!' said the wizard very nervously.

«‹I never laid out a penny in law upon a customer; I never refused small beer to-'

"Silence!' cried Father Lotus: 'don't offend philosophy by thus bragging of your follies. You are in a perilous condition; still you may be saved. At this very moment, I much fear it, gangrene has touched your soul; nevertheless, I can separate the sound from the mortified parts, and start you new again as though your lips were first wet with mother's milk.'

Pugwash merely said,- for the wizard began to awe him,— 'I'm very much obliged to you.'

"Now,' said Lotus, answer a few questions, and then I'll proceed to the cure. What do you think of money?'

"A very nice thing,' said Pugwash, though I can do with as little of it as most folks.'

"Father Lotus shook his head. 'Well, and the world about you ?>

"A beautiful world,' said Pugwash; 'only the worst of it is, I can't leave the shop as often as I would, to enjoy it. I'm shut in all day long, I may say, a prisoner to brick-dust, herrings, and bacon. Sometimes when the sun shines and the cobbler's lark over the way sings as if he'd split his pipe, why then, do you