is tranquillity itself.  It is fair to say that really nervous and irritable people find the country worse than town.  The noise of the nightingales is deplorable.  The lamentations of a cow deprived of her calf, or of a passion-stricken cow, “wailing for her demon lover” on the next farm, excel anything that the milkman can perpetrate, and almost vie with the performances of the sweep.  When “the cocks are crowing a merry midnight,” as in the ballad, the sleepless patient wishes he could make off as quietly and quickly as the ghostly sons of the “Wife of Usher’s Well.”  Dogs delight to bark in the country more than in town.  Leech’s picture of the unfortunate victim who left London to avoid noise, and found that the country was haunted by Cochin-China cocks, illustrates the still repose of the rural life.  Nervous people, on the whole, are in a minute minority.  No one else seems to mind how loud and horrible the noises of London are, and therefore we have faint hope of seeing nocturnal ’Arry gagged, the drunken drab “moved on,” and the sweep compelled to ring the bell till some one comes and opens the door of the house in whose chimneys he is professionally interested.

LENDING OF BOOKS.

A popular clergyman has found it necessary to appeal to his friends in a very touching way.  The friends of the divine are requested to return “Colenso on the Pentateuch,” and another volume which they have borrowed.  The advertisement has none of that irony which finds play in the notice, “The Gentleman who took a brown silk umbrella, with gold crutch handle, and left a blue cotton article, is asked to restore the former.”  The advertiser seems to speak more in sorrow and in hope than in anger, and we sincerely trust that he may get his second volume of “Colenso on the Pentateuch.”  But if he does, he will be more fortunate than most owners of books.  Pitiful are their thoughts as they look round their shelves.  The silent friends of their youth, the acquisitions of their mature age, have departed.  Even popular preachers cannot work miracles, like Thomas a Kempis, and pray back their borrowed volumes.  As the Rev. Robert Elsmere says, “Miracles do not happen”—­at least, to book-collectors.

“Murray sighs o’er Pope and Swift, and many a treasure more,” said Cowper, when Lord Mansfield’s house was burned, and we have all had experience of the sorrows of Murray.  Even people who are not bibliophiles, nay, who class bibliophiles with “blue-and-white young men,” know that a book in several volumes loses an unfair proportion of its usefulness, and almost all its value, when one or more of the volumes are gone.  Grote’s works, or Mill’s, Carlyle’s, or Milman’s, seem nothing when they are incomplete.  It always happens, somehow, that the very tome you want to consult is that which has fallen among borrowers.  Even Panurge, who praised the race of borrowers so eloquently, could scarcely have found an excuse for the borrowers of books.