villages that man ever sat his eyes on, I saw what I never saw before; namely, a gooseberry tree trained against a house.  The house was one of those ancient buildings, consisting of a frame of oak wood, the internal filled up with brick, plastered over.  The tree had been planted at the foot of one of the perpendicular pieces of wood; from the stem which, mounted up this piece of wood, were taken side limbs to run along the horizontal pieces.  There were two windows, round the frame of each of which the limbs had been trained.  The height of the highest shoot was about ten feet from the ground, and the horizontal shoots on each side were from eight to ten feet in length.  The tree had been judiciously pruned, and all the limbs were full of very large gooseberries, considering the age of the fruit.  This is only one instance out of thousands that I saw of extraordinary pains taken with the gardens.”

* * * * *

A WINTER’S NIGHT.

  How beautiful this night!  The balmiest sigh
  Which vernal Zephyrs breathe in evening’s ear,
  Were discord to the speaking quietude
  That wraps this moveless scene.  Heaven’s ebon vault,
  Studded with stars unutterably bright,
  Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls,
  Seems like a canopy which Love had spread
  To curtain her sleeping world.  Yon gentle hills,
  Robed in a garment of untrodden snow;
  Yon darksome walls, whence icicles depend
  So stainless, that their white and glittering spears
  Tinge not the moon’s pure beam; yon castled steep,
  Whose banner hangeth o’er the time-worn tower
  So idly, that wrapt Fancy deemeth it
  A metaphor of Peace—­all form a scene
  Where musing Solitude might love to lift
  Her soul above this sphere of earthliness;
  Where silence undisturbed might watch alone
  So cold, so bright, so still.

P.B.  SHELLEY.

* * * * *

HACKNEY COACHES.

Nothing in nature or art can be so abominable as those vehicles at this hour.  We are quite satisfied that, except an Englishman, who will endure any thing, no native of any climate under the sky would endure a London hackney coach; that an Ashantee gentleman would scoff at it; and that an aboriginal of New South Wales would refuse to be inhumed within its shattered and infinite squalidness.  It is true, that the vehicle has its merits, if variety of uses can establish them.  The hackney coach conveys alike the living and the dead.  It carries the dying man to the hospital, and when doctors and tax-gatherers can tantalize no more, it carries him to Surgeons’ Hall, and qualifies him to assist the “march of mind” by the section of body.  If the midnight thief find his plunder too ponderous for his hands, the hackney coach offers its services, and is one of the