and Withersfield; thence over the Downs to Cambridge; and from thence, keeping still the cross roads, he went by Fenny Stratford, [9] to Godmanchester and Huntingdon, where he and his mare baited about an hour; and, as he said himself, he slept about half an hour:  then holding on the north road, and keeping a full gallop most of the way, he came to York the same afternoon; put off his boots and riding clothes, and went dressed as if he had been an inhabitant of the place, to the bowling-green, where, among many other gentlemen, was the Lord Mayor of the city.  He, singling out his lordship, studied to do something particular that the mayor might remember him, and then took occasion to ask him what o’clock it was.  The mayor, pulling out his watch, told him the time, which was a quarter before, or a quarter after eight at night.  Upon a prosecution for this robbery, the whole merit of the case turned upon this single point:—­the person robbed, swore to the man, to the place, and to the time, in which the robbery was committed; but Nicks, proving by the Lord Mayor of York, that he was as far off as Yorkshire at that time, the jury acquitted him on the bare supposition, that the man could not be at two places so remote on one and the same day.

    [9] Fenny, or Fen Stanton, not Stratford, must be here meant, as
    the former is in the direct road from Cambridge to Huntingdon.

I need not remind your numerous readers that the roads in 1676 were in a very different plight to those of 1831; at the former period it would not have been possible for Tom Thumb to have trotted sixteen miles an hour on any turnpike road in England.  Even my friend, the respected driver of the Old Union Cambridge Coach to London, can remember, in his time, the coach being two days on the road, and occasionally being indebted to farmers for the loan of horses to drag the coach wheels out of their sloughy tracks.

J.S.W.

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DIGNIFIED REPROOF.

Catherine Parthenay, niece of the celebrated Anna Parthenay, returned this spirited reply to the importunities of Henry IV.—­“Your majesty must know, that although I am too humble to become your wife, I am at the same time descended from too illustrious a family ever to become your mistress.”

P.

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L—­A—­W.

The circumlocution and diffuseness of law papers—­the apparent redundancy of terms, and multiplicity of synonymes, which may be found on all judicial proceedings, are happily hit off in the following, which we copy from Jenk’s New York Evening Journal:—­