head newsmonger of our day, stationed himself at Ghent, and kept his eye upon the hotel in which Louis the Eighteenth was lodged, with the keenness of a man whose bread-and-butter is implicated in the success of his procuring intelligence.

Now it so happened that Louis the Eighteenth, who liked to play the king, had consented to do so publicly, in order to gratify the worthy inhabitants of Ghent. In order to do this, he had consented to eat his breakfast in public on the following morning, just as it was the ouRIE at the Tuileries for the Royal family to dine in poble on eemalt daye. Their majesties or their princedoms ate their meal, while the poble marched along a kind of corridor to behold them. Well our DENL agent of course attended this breakfast, as the sight of the day. He walked in and up-stairs with the crowd of Ghentis, entered the rem where Louis the Corpulent was eating with good appetite. There was scarcely a partition between his Majesty's breakfast-tasue and the pubiles and our agent paused, with anxious and lingering respect, to course the royal jaws in the very simple, but not suite, operatón vi partıq food.

Louis had just devoured his last esp, and our friend der ured the monarch in turn with his eyes, when a clatter was beard in the even below. A horseman had entered at full speed, and with eqtai rest, would appear, the said borseman made his way up the staire, tetemined to deliver his message into the riyal habi. The mesenger was neither more nor less than a excrier, with short varsed by Là ÉS, 60 as foreign couriers wear; and be handed to his Majesty a large evenge, which when opened erntained a paper with a very few wZÁL Duke of Wellington had won a great battle on the felt of Waterbon Bonaparte had fled, and his army was destroyed, reset, and diperbol The old King handed the paper to be read aloud, and by tore were a contents more greedily swallowed than by the agent of the Bothaen ida And then the old King, staring to his not very firm og .. to walk upon them over to the sacrer, who stood waiting for nia guerdon, and bestowed upon the poor man a guerdon that be very inte expected, viz., an embrace and a kiss upon both his merica Oz jug Lega man, however elated before, wa watazed, quite shared that, int Royalty, but manhood could inflat spot man kun a thing at a c He uttered an exclamation, went sot, put on his tat, rævet % Gemt, put to sea in a filing-bres, and got to the Engles cast and to lentam long before a packet, post, or anitary sewing.

His first care was to inform me patrica, the Mean Buhari da, won paid him many, ut erated to dous d na oneftAMS, They then told him, that, after a certain hour of that day be te maa morning) struck by the Locose sortą, be might rau xiz ve te pleased of his intelligen Auringy my genteras from Facher paced up and down before the Hone Guards wt ve can end A know not what boer, whether deren or trate).

he walked into Dewing Stret and temanded a CSAK WO Love Liver pool. His paper, sesi & Greet in me a day, won pe toate the shyness of official reserve and he was tow ang 20% the zemetes of the Premier. He told the wory, a I saw we i, from the 25 matter of his inseca, tre as wet 19% we But he never mentioned the he he would so what we

Never was man in a porw Long Do virgand

been in the lowest spirits, oppressed by previous accounts, and he did not believe a word of his informant's story. It was a stock-jobbing business. The Duke would have sent a messenger from the field to Downing Street much sooner than to Ghent. Had the agent been a breathless soldier from the field, he might have believed him; but a mere clerk, with a tale gleaned sixty miles from the field, and no corroboration. Besides, the news was too good to be true.

In his perplexity, however, Lord Liverpool sent round all the offices to all the people likely to know anything, or to be good judges in the matter. The deuce a one could be found, but Croker. He came and questioned the agent, nay cross-questioned him in his sharp way. But there was no shaking his evidence. "Well," says the Rothschildian to the officials, "you still doubt me, as if I would come here to lie for a paltry reward. If you wont believe what I tell you about the King of France and the courier who brought him the news, how will you believe what I am going to tell you, and what astonished me more than anything else; when Louis the Eighteenth read the letter, he started up, hugged the dusty, dirty courier, and kissed the fellow on both cheeks."

“My lord,” said Mr. Croker, "you may believe every word this gentleman says. For no English imagination could invent this circumstance of the kiss; and no possible circumstance could be a stronger guarantee of truth."

Lord Liverpool therefore did believe, and was glad. But many still kept doubting. It was too good to be true; and why was the duke silent? Major Percy, with the dispatches, did not arrive till late in the evening; and when he did come, he could find nobody. His anxiety was to find the King. But no being could tell where his Majesty George the Fourth had dined, or where he spent the evening. At last the monarch was unearthed at Mrs. Boehm's, before whose door Percy stopped with his jaded coach and four; and the Regent was enabled to inform the worshipful company around him, that the star of Napoleon Bonaparte had definitively set on the field of Waterloo.

A LITTLE MISTAKE.

WHAT a world of little hopes and fears may be aroused by a post

man's knock!

Are you in love? How your heart palpitates at the sound that announces the longed-for missive! Are you in business? You look calm and imperturbable when that sudden beat resounds on your hall door; you sneer at your wife, and you reprove your infants for their impatience to know who it's for;" but you are only very properly acting your dignified role of a man of business and father of a family. Are you in debt? Poor fellow' how you tremble lest the businesslike flourish of the hard-hearted Schneider, who wont renew, and wont give time, should meet your eye-prophetic of dire resolutions to place the affair in the hands of his attorney. And all these varied emotions, and ten thousand others, be your position in life what it may, can be called up by that simple, sudden, startling little "rat-tat!"

Marmaduke Wilmington, Esq., had just heard this same exciting sound, as he sat at breakfast in his lodgings in Bury-street, St. James's. Thereupon, Mr. Wilmington had laid down an uplifted piece of toast, in which a little horse-shoe had already been formed by his grinders, removed one slippered foot from the fender on which it had been resting, and raised his eyes from that highly interesting portion of the "Morning Post," headed Sporting Intelligence." It was clear that Mr. Wilmington expected a letter.

Mr. Wilmington's valet, however, well-knowing that the street door had a letter-box, and that he personally had no interest in any epite which might arrive, continned in the kitchen his perusal of a critique ou last night's new ballet, perfectly undisturbed by the noiBY BLAULLOUS WA MO had aroused his master, and in no hurry to attend to it. Wale be in foodar ing the ballet, and his master is only restrained from ringing the well violently, and demanding whether the letter is for mum or sot, by dok sense of the very dignified appearance that upated webiz Barat, let us examine the latter gentleman with a inte asennus.

Marmaduke Wilmington had arrived at the age is the voted "old" by young ladies of eighteen, target" in the p ladies' mammas, and quite a young fellow," vy young on grafande who wear spectacles, and put their trust a port w tak Is in ang kah would have ranked among the score, a te ver se vous book was e juvenile junior, in fact, he was about fury,

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suggested the slightest clue to the secret of the worthy gentleman's resources. But we are wandering from the point, which, for the nonce, is the personal appearance alone of Mr. Marmaduke Wilmington.

The distinguishing characteristics of his face were brilliant grey eyes, not the brilliancy which pleases and fascinates, but that which tells of a keen and piercing, though not lofty, intellect; a profusion of iron-grey hair, curling and close cut; for the wearer was neither an artist, a German student, nor a "snob;" those, we believe, are the only characters in the present day who are guilty of hair dangling on to their shoulders. The forehead was large, but not lofty, indicating to the eye of the phrenologist more of shrewdness than of genius. The nose was large and aquiline; the mouth, that truest index to the character, was rather large, the lips being full and well cut; but there was an expression of refined sensuality, of smiling, smooth, polished craftiness in it, that would have told Lavater far more of Mr. Wilmington's moral nature than he would probably have wished to be read by any one. A set of dazzingly white teeth (his own or Cartwright's), a well-made figure, and an undeniable foot and hand, completed as good-looking a man-about-town as forty-nine in every fifty, whose patent leathers grind the pavement of St. James's.

And now, Mr. Wilmington's valet having arrived at the bouquets and the furore, &c., in the closing scene of the last night's ballet, has relinquished the paper, and sought the letter-box, and is now entering his master's room with a large, coarse, dirty-looking epistle, bearing many a thumb-mark, and sealed with divers little impressions of the end of a watch key.

"I'll trouble you in future, sir, to bring my letters as soon as they arrive," said Mr. Wilmington, in a dignified and decided manner.

"Yes, sir," was the stereotyped reply of the valet, as of valets and flunkies in general, as he laid the dirty letter on the table and then left

the room.

"Well to be sure!" he added to himself as he descended the stairs. "A precious pretty fuss about a dirty letter like that; hang me if I shouldn't be ashamed to receive such a thing. 'Pon my soul if any more of them comes, I must resign-reely I must-my reputation 's at stake. I wonder who the dooce can have written it? It ain't a dun, for he hasn't got any; and by the by, I reely don't think that's quite comifo, a gentleman ought to have a few duns for appearance's sake he ought, 'pon my soul; I've one or two myself. There's that cussed little Ben Medex with my little acceptance for the £10 flimsy; noosance, he's got almost insolent at last. Then there's Tongs the 'airdresser, with his little account for pommard and bookey de rain, he's had the impudence to write me a saucy letter for a settlement. it's exciting, reelly it is. And Wilmington, dash it, pays ready money; such a nasty beggarly way of doing things! Besides, where 's my commission and perquisites? Tradespeople don't care a fig for us, when our governors pay cash. It's shameful, reelly!"

the little

Well,

Such were the valet's reflections as he retired, while his master broke open the dirty letter and read as follows:

"MR. WILMINGTON,

"Ventom Hall, Nov. 2nd, 1849.

"SIR.-The filly ain't safe by no means. There's a dangerous looking chap arter her, and the guverner likes him.

He means mischiff, I

can tell you. So if you means to run for the plate, you'd better come down and enter at wonce, or I wouldn't back you at no odds soon.

"Your survant to comand,

"JAMES WHIPSTOCK."

Marmaduke Wilmington laid down the letter with an abstracted air, took it up again and re-read it; and then, finding that it emitted a compound odour of stale tobacco, leather, and stable manure, he threw it into the fire.

"A devil of a bore this. To go out of town at this time of the year, and to that slow place, too! Shooting and hunting over! There's fishing enough, to be sure, but I hate fishing at least for fish. Ha! ha! However, this is a matter of business. The girl has her thirty thousand there's no doubt of that. She's tolerably pretty too, if it were not for that confounded gaucherie that all these country-bred girls have. That can be soon rubbed off in town, at all events. Yes, decidedly this is a chance not to be thrown away. The old baronet likes me too, I believe. But who the deuce can be this dangerouslooking chap,' as worthy Jim calls him? Hang the fellow, what can he want in the country in April? He must be a snob. No matter, I'll run no risks. Allons, then !"

He seized a pen, and on a neat sheet of note-paper wrote as follows:

"DEAR SIR THOMAS,

Availing myself of your kind general invitation, I propose coming down to Ventom for a few days, as I am ordered by my physician to take a little country air.-Kindest regards to the ladies.

"Ever yours most faithfully,

"MARMADUKE WILMINGTON.

"Sir Thomas Ventom, Bart. Ventom Hall, Warwickshire."

"Cool, that, decidedly," he said, as he sealed the letter; "but he'll call it hearty, and so forth; so it's all right, and to-morrow I'll dine at Ventom Hall."

Ventom Hall was like hundreds of other halls in England, but in no other country. It was a handsome, convenient and unpretending edifice, standing in a park, with greensward, fallow deer, and tall trees in abundance, besides a fair-sized sheet of water, called a lake, and with kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, conservatories, &c. In a word, George Robins would have made a splendid description out of it, but neither our taste nor our talent lying in that direction, we wont venture on the ground of the late Prince of Auctioneers.

Its present owner was Sir Thomas Ventom, descended from the Ventoms that came over with the Conqueror-of course. By the way, we are personally acquainted with almost as many lineal descendants of the Conqueror's followers as the numbers of the latter actually amounted to; nay, we are not sure that we could not tell of more names than the Roll of Battle Abbey contains, owned by people who swear their ancestor was one of William's knights. This is decidedly curious and puzzling. However, it is no business of ours. Our own family is undoubtedly from the Conqueror's stock. Everybody has heard of the Le Bruns, from which we, the Browns, are descended. But this is digressing.