till the result was worthy of a Smithfield premium. It was not the triumph, however, of any systematic diet for the promotion of fat,—(except oyster-eating there is no human system of stall-feeding,)—on the contrary, she lived abstemiously, diluting her food with pickle-acids, and keeping frequent fasts in order to reduce her compass; but they failed of this desirable effect. Nature had planned an original tendency in her organization that was not to be overcome:—she would have fattened on sour krout.
“My uncle, on the other hand, decreased daily; originally a little man, he became lean, shrunken, wizened. There was a predisposition in his constitution that made him spare, and kept him so:—he would have fallen off even on brewer’s grains.
“It was the common joke of the neighbourhood to designate my aunt, my uncle, and the infant Shakerly, as ‘Wholesale, Retail, and For Exportation;’ and, in truth, they were not inapt impersonations of that popular inscription,—my aunt a giantess, my uncle a pigmy, and the child being ‘carried abroad.’”—This is the commencement of an article entitled “The Decline of Mrs. Shakerly.”
A story of “the Absentee,” and of the “absent tea,” on a friend’s visit to him, is painfully whimsical. Akin to it is an engraving of a person who had retired to rest coming down stairs in his shirt, and shorts, and great alarm, with a chamber-light in his hand, and the top of his nightcap in a smothering blaze, exclaiming
“Don’t you smell Fire?”
Run!—run for St. Clement’s engine!
For the pawnbroker’s all in a blaze,
And the pledges are frying and singing—
Oh! how the poor pawners will craze!
Now where can the turncock be drinking?
Was there ever so thirsty an elf?—
But he still may tope on, for I’m thinking
That the plugs are as dry as himself.
The engines!—I hear them come rumbling:
There’s the Phœnix! the Globe! and the Sun!
What a row there will be, and a grumbling,
When the water don’t start for a run!
See! there they come racing and tearing,
All the street with loud voices is fill’d;
Oh! it’s only the firemen a-swearing
At a man they’ve run over and kill’d!
How sweetly the sparks fly away now,
And twinkle like stars in the sky;
It’s a wonder the engines don’t play now
But I never saw water so shy!
Why there isn’t enough for a snipe,
And the fire it is fiercer, alas!
Oh! instead of the New River pipe,
They have gone—that they have—to the gas!
Only look at the poor little P——’s
On the roof—is there any thing sadder?
My dears, keep fast hold, if you please,
And they won’t be an hour with the ladder!
But if any one’s hot in their feet,
And in very great haste to be sav’d,
Here’s a nice easy bit in the street,
That M‘Adam has lately unpav’d!
There is some one—I see a dark shape
At that window, the hottest of all,—
My good woman, why don’t you escape?
Never think of your bonnet and shawl:
If your dress is’nt perfect, what is it
For once in a way to your hurt?
When your husband is paying a visit
There, at Number Fourteen, in his shirt!