Indeed, his talent for scripture quotation is so great, that I am told he does not confine it to the pulpit; but that he has a text for every incident of ordinary life, and every turn of common conversation. His clerical and

clever neighbour, the Rev. William Mirehouse, tells a good story illustrative of his custom in this respect. It was a cold piercing day in winter, and Mr. M. was running along the road to keep himself warm, when he saw the Curate of Portbury coming towards him. Aware of his brother's partiality for texts, the Vicar of Easton-inGordano thought that for once he'd do him out of his darling indulgence; so he merely said, as he ran by buttoning up his coat as he spoke, "a sharp day, Mr. Burges." "Yes," said the Curate of Portbury, without pausing, "Who can stand before his cold?'" (Psalm cxlvii. 17.) "There was no escaping from so quick a hand," added the Vicar of St. George's, as he told the story, "he shot me flying!"

But to return to the sermon. As one might expect from a colloquial preacher, an odd expression, or an odd idea, not unfrequently escaped him. An illustration of the scriptural phrase, the "gates of hell," was, perhaps, one of the most remarkable. "The gates of hell shall not prevail," was an oriental figure, he said; as the place of council, where the great men met to consult and take measures against their enemies, was situated by or in the gates of the eastern cities; "it was there they assembled, as the Corporation of Bristol assembled in the Council House, to consult; and hence it was said, 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' Not being one of the municipal body, I, of course, did not feel the compliment; but had that worshipful phalanx been present, and still possessed their old advowsons, they would, no doubt, have rewarded with a good living the ingenuity that could so flatteringly elucidate the " gates of hell" from the Bristol Town Council! It was quite as good as Cobbett's grammar example, "the House of Commons, a den of thieves."

The Curate had proceeded nearly half-way through his sermon without making any allusion to me, so that I be

gan to hope my former fears were groundless; when the discourse, taking a sudden turn, he began to enlarge on the various motives which brought people to Church. This was drawing near home; I saw, as the saying is, a cloud coming from Capua, and began to feel uncomfortable. "Some, perhaps," said he, "who never came before, come to criticise the sermon;" and he knit his brows and looked terribly towards me, while I, half frightened out of my life, shifted myself under cover of the pillar that interposed between us; where I felt as much at ease as a man might be who, ensconced behind a tree, hears ever and anon the rifle bullets glancing on both sides of him. "Some, perhaps, come to remark upon the preacher," he continued, (and the Indian officer was in his indignant voice,) "but such persons have no business here."

It was not indeed till after the Benediction that I began to breathe freely; and the first use I made of my recovered voice was to say, that I forgave him with all my heart. And I do; indeed, I question if I do not like him all the better for his boldness, though he put me into a terrible fright. He is as severe as the Rev. Horatio Montagu, who has been preaching against me in almost every Church in the diocese, and who is likewise wholly forgiven for his pains.

After service I thought to take a view of the Church, but the Curate, who still continued in the pulpit, followed me with his eye until I was glad to beat a retreat. I could see, however, from the cursory glance I had, that the Church must have been at one time, a noble structure, and there are still such remnants of coloured glass, as make me think that every window in the noble pile was at one period "storied" and "richly dight," when the whole must have presented a fine and imposing appearance.

I did not go into the chancel, as I must have passed under fire of the pulpit to do so. Collinson, however, tells us "there are in the south wall three large niches, with a fourth above it, which is smaller; and has at the bottom a basin for holy water,"- -a sentence which shows. that my friend Collinson set about writing a book of antiquities without knowing anything of ecclesiastical

architecture-the three large niches are the sedilia or seats for the officiating priests, and the smaller the piscina or place where they performed the sacramental ablutions, not a font for holy water; and at the east end of the south aisle there are also the same remains, which show that there was likewise an altar there at one time. There are no monuments that I could see.

The porch is spacious; it was hung with parish papers, and property and income-tax notices. I glanced at the latter with the utmost unconcern, knowing that my annuity being just a shade under the £150, left me free of the collector.

The tombs in the churchyard have nothing remarkable that I know about them, though the old yews, two of which are, at the trunk, eighteen or nineteen feet in circumference, cast a solemn shadow over the simple graves. There is a head-stone, however, fixed up with a pink and blue gold picture of a woman weeping over a sarcophagus, which is the first thing to catch the eye as you approach the Church, and which I would advise the Curate to mutilate and break down some moonlight night.

Mr. Burges is pleasantly lodged in the only house in the parish fit to accommodate the Clergyman, and for which James Adam Gordon, as the owner of all the property round, has the conscience to charge him fifty pounds a year. If I ever inherit Mr. G.'s estate, the Curate shall have his parsonage rent free. As Mr. B. has £70 a-year stipend, after deducting this charge, the large surplusage of £20 for three hundred and sixty-five hard days' work remains. Mr. Burges is in good condition, but he could not have grown fat upon this. However, albeit he preached at me, and was a little injudicious at times in his sermon, I will say he is, though so poorly paid, a zealous, and pains-taking, and hard-working clergyman, and well calculated for a rural congregation, though he might not do, perhaps very famously as one of the Chaplains of St. James's.

I noticed in the neighbourhood some prize allotments, and a farm manured by thunder and lightning-I mean by electricity, or galvanism, or whatever you call it.

Titherington.

In an age so much abounding in early and minute intelligence, it may interest the reader to know that last week, admonished by the rainy gusts and raw mornings, I sent my old great coat to be overhauled; to have the collar looked to, the cuffs renewed, a button or two replaced, and some stray stitches supplied. The Michaelmas daisy and my brown surtout generally make their appearance together, though the latter always holds possession of public attention long after the former has disappeared.

Clad in the panoply of this same surtout, I set out on Sunday last with the sober intention of paying a visit to Tortworth, but by a series of mischances and misdirections Titherington, (some three miles from Thornbury, whether north, south, east, or west, I am sure I cannot say,) was eventually my destination. I cannot well explain how I came to ride so wide of my original mark. I got off my road in some of my ruminations; and when I come to consider how I was engaged in anything but meditating upon my route, I am not much surprised at the occurrence.

These October days always set my brains wool-gathering on mortality, man, life, and death; for all nature round about you is suggestive of such "far resistless musings." I rode on amidst a shower of falling leavesflakes of dead foliage, turning their sered and whitened surfaces over and over as they descended, filled the air, and death, death, death was going on busily in the vegetable world on all sides; each bleached and withered leaf that fell was the corpse of a created thing that once was green in youth," shone in the sunshine, and fluttered in the summer breeze, full of life. Then the gale made such sport of their poor forms; some huddled in heaps under the shelter of the hedge, and decayed away in each other's arms, as if "lovely in their lives, in death they would not

be divided;" but those that fell on the highway were caught up by the wind, and whirled about in a kind of death dance, rattling their crisp skeletons against each other and along the dry road, or leaping up wildly in the air as if they tried to reach their native branches again. Every time a blast, too, more strong than usual, made the oaks swing about their knotted arms with increased violence, down came the acorns out of their husks, with sharp taps on my hat and shoulders, as if the arch equinoctial spirits were up in the great boughs above me, and pelted the traveller in their rude sport as he passed beneath; while two bold blackbirds kept dashing in and out of the bushes, romping in the hedgerows for half-a-mile before me, and frightening the sparrows which rose in thick whirring clusters, startled at their boisterous mirth. Even John, I saw, felt that the summer was gone; and if ever rider could interpret the feelings of his horse, I should say his gravity was hurt at the wild sport which the wind made amongst the few remaining hairs of his mane, and the bushy but abridged honours of his tail. He did not seem happy; and when the sow, which had been grubbing with its young brood for the fallen acorns amongst the grass on the road side, put up its nose, and all its nine farrow put up their little noses also, as if in greeting, he took no notice, or else snorted gruffly, as much as to say, "I'm out of temper to-day; I don't understand having my tail blown about out of all shape, or in between my legs, in this way."

Just as I have led you, my dear reader, wide of the subject for the last forty lines, did I lose my own way while thinking and wrapt in autumnal fancies on Sunday last. As I said before, I meant to have gone to Tortworth; somewhere in the neighbourhood of Falfield, however, Í made a wrong turn, and was aroused from my ruminations by hearing the distant sounds of some Church bells. When you make a blunder, whether it be in life or on a journey, your best way is to stand still until you get some one to set you right, for you seldom gain anything by trying to bungle your way out of it. So I stood still until