[C] Tinnie, the small porringer of children.
[D] Insipid.
MCXXIII.—TIMELY AID.
A lady was followed by a beggar, who very importunately asked her for alms. She refused him; when he quitted her, saying, with a profound sigh, "Yet the alms I asked you for would have prevented me executing my present resolution!" The lady was alarmed lest the man should commit some rash attempt on his own life. She called him back, and gave him a shilling, and asked him the meaning of what he had just said. "Madam," said the fellow, laying hold of the money, "I have been begging all day in vain, and but for this shilling I should have been obliged to work!"
MCXXIV.—WHIST.
Mrs. Bray relates the following of a Devonshire physician, happily named Vial, who was a desperate lover of whist. One evening in the midst of a deal, the doctor fell off his chair in a fit. Consternation seized on the company. Was he alive or dead? At length he showed signs of life, and, retaining the last fond idea which had possessed him at the moment he fell into the fit, exclaimed, "What is trumps?"
MCXXV.—HENRY ERSKINE.
The late Hon. Henry Erskine met his acquaintance Jemmy Ba—four, a barrister, who dealt in hard words and circumlocutious sentences. Perceiving that his ankle was tied up with a silk handkerchief, the former asked the cause. "Why, my dear sir," answered the wordy lawyer, "I was taking a romantic ramble in my brother's grounds, when, coming to a gate, I had to climb over it, by which I came in contact with the first bar, and have grazed the epidermis on my skin, attended with a slight extravasation of blood."—"You may thank your lucky stars," replied Mr. Erskine, "that your brother's gate was not as lofty as your style, or you must have broken your neck."
MCXXVI.—THE ABBEY CHURCH AT BATH.
These walls, so full of monuments and bust,
Show how Bath waters serve to lay the dust.