two ladies, grouped like the Graces, in the centre of the apartment.

“Well, Scrapshins,” said the gentleman, “I have called for my teeth. You see I have kept my promise.” Hans sighed deeply, and the ladies giggled.

“Nay, man, never look so glum! Here, take the flask—forget Agnes, and console yourself with the love of”—

The conclusion of this harangue must for ever remain a mystery; for Hans, at this moment, took up the family volume which had served him for a pillow, and dashed it at the heads of the trio. A scream, so loud that it broke the tympanum of his left ear, seemed to issue from them simultaneously—a thick vapour filled the room, which gradually cleared off, and left no traces of Hans’ visitors but three small sticks of stone brimstone. The truth flashed upon the barber—his visitor was the far-famed Mephistopheles. Hans packed up his remaining wardrobe, razor, strop, soap-dish, scissors and combs, and turned his back upon Stocksbawler forever. Four years passed away, and Hans was again a thriving man, and Agnes Flirtitz the wife of the doctor of Stocksbawler. Another year passed on, and Hans was both a husband and a father; but the coquette who had nearly been his ruin had eloped with the chasseur of a travelling nobleman.

LAURIE ON GEOGRAPHY.

Sir P. Laurie has sent to say that he has looked into Dr. Farr’s “Medical Guide to Nice,” and is much disappointed. He hoped to have seen a print of the eternally-talked of “Nice Young Man,” in the costume of the country. He doubts, moreover, that the Doctor has ever been there, for his remarks show him not to have been “over Nice.”

COOMBE’S LUNGS AND LEARNING.

Dr. Coombe, in his new work upon America, by some anatomical process, invariably connects large lungs with expansive intellect. Our and Finsbury’s friend, Tom Duncombe, declares, in his opinion, this must be the origin of the received expression for the mighty savans, viz., the “lights of literature.”

PARLIAMENTARY MASONS.—PARLIAMENTARY PICTURES.

Was there ever anything so lucky that the strike of the masons should have happened at this identical juncture! Parliament is prorogued. Now, deducting Sir Robert Peel, physician, with his train of apothecaries and pestle-and-mortar apprentices, who, until February next, are to sit cross-legged and try to think, there are at least six hundred and thirty unemployed members of the House of Commons, turned upon the world with nothing, poor fellows! but grouse before them. Some, to be sure, may pick their teeth, in the Gardens of the Tuileries—some may even now venture to exercise their favourite elbow at Baden-Baden,—but with every possible and probable exception, there will yet be hundreds of unemployed law-makers, to whom time will be a heavy porter’s burden.

We have a plan which, for its originality, should draw down upon us the gratitude of the nation. It is no other than this: to make all Members of Parliament, for once in their lives at least, useful. The masons, hired to build the new temples of Parliament, have struck. The hard-handed ingrates,—let them go! We propose that, during the prorogation at least, Members of Parliament, should, like beavers, build their own Houses. In a word, every member elected to a seat in Parliament should be compelled, like Robinson Crusoe, to make his own furniture before he could sit down upon it.

Have we not a hundred examples of the peculiar fitness of the task, in the habits of what in our human arrogance we call the lower animals? There is many a respectable spider who would justly feel himself calumniated by any comparison between him and any one of twenty Parliamentary lawyers we could name; yet the spider spins its own web, and seeks its own nook of refuge from the Reform Broom of Molly the housemaid. And then, the tiny insect, the ant—that living, silent monitor to unregarding men—doth it not make its own galleries, build with toilsome art its own abiding place? Does not the mole scratch its own chamber—the carrion kite build its own nest! Shall cuckoos and Members of Parliament alone be lodged at others’ pains?

Consider the wasp, oh, STANLEY! mark its nest of paper.—(it is said, on wasp’s paper you are wont to write your thoughts on Ireland)—and resolutely seize a trowel!

Look to the bee, oh, COLONEL SIBTHORP! See how it elaborates its virgin wax, how it shapes its luscious cone—and though we would not trust you to place a brick upon a brick, nevertheless you may, under instruction, mix the mortar!

Ponder on the rat and its doings, most wise BURDETT—see how craftily it makes its hole—and though you are too age-stricken to carry a hod, you may at least do this much—sift the lime.

But wherefore thus particular—why should we dwell on individuals? Pole-cat, weasel, ferret, hedgehog, with all your vermin affinities, come forth, and staring reproachfully in the faces of all prorogued Members, bid them imitate your zeal and pains, and—the masons having struck—build their Houses for themselves.

(We make this proposal in no thoughtless—no bantering spirit. He can see very little into the most transparent mill-stone who believes that we pen these essays—essays that will endure and glisten as long, ay as long as the freshest mackerel—if he think that we sit down to this our weekly labour in a careless lackadaisical humour. By no means. Like Sir LYTTON BULWER, when he girds up his loins to write an apocryphal comedy, we approach our work with graceful solemnity. Like Sir LYTTON, too, we always dress for the particular work we have in hand. Sir LYTTON wrote “Richelieu” in a harlequin’s jacket (sticking pirate’s pistols in his belt, ere he valorously took whole scenes from a French melo-drama): we penned our last week’s essay in a suit of old canonicals, with a tie-wig askew upon our beating temples, and are at this moment cased in a court-suit of cut velvet, with our hair curled, our whiskers crisped, and a masonic apron decorating our middle man. Having subsided into our chair—it is in most respects like the porphyry piece of furniture of the Pope—and our housekeeper having played the Dead March in Saul on our chamber organ (BULWER wrote “The Sea Captain” to the preludizing of a Jew’s-harp), we enter on our this week’s labour. We state thus much, that our readers may know with what pains we prepare ourselves for them. Besides, when BULWER thinks it right that the world should know that the idea of “La Vailière” first hit him in the rotonde of a French diligence, modest as we are, can we suppose that the world will not be anxious to learn in what coloured coat we think, and whether, when we scratch our head to assist the thought that sticks by the way, we displace a velvet cap or a Truefitt’s scalp?)

Reader, the above parenthesis may be skipped or not. Read not a line of it—the omission will not maim our argument. So to proceed.

If we cast our eyes over the debates of the last six months, we shall find that hundreds of members of the House of Commons have exhibited the most extraordinary powers of ill-directed labour. And then their capacity of endurance! Arguments that would have knocked down any reasonable elephant have touched them no more than would summer gnats. Well, why not awake this sleeping strength? Why not divert a mischievous potency into beneficial action? Why should we confine a body of men to making laws, when so many of them might be more usefully employed in wheeling barrows? Now there is Mr. PLUMPTRE, who has done so much to make English Sundays respectable—would he not be working far more enduring utility with pickaxe or spade than by labouring at enactments to stop the flowing of the Thames on the Sabbath? Might not D’ISRAELI be turned into a very jaunty carpenter, and be set