A COUNTRY APOTHECARY.

by his verses, or laughed at for his homage; Valentine. I think, with the little clerk, that but as a real substantial Valentine, a present they will be married at Whitsuntide, if not wooer, a future husband, and he so ugly, and before. a poet too-Oh dear! she was frightened to think of it! This impression first broke forth to his sister-who communicated the news of his intended arrival-in a variety of questions, as to Stephen's height, and size, and shape, and complexion; especially as compared with Daniel Tubb's! and was afterwards displayed to that rustic adorer himself; not by words, indeed, but by the encouraging silence and saucy smile with which she listened to his account of the debarkation of his cockney rival, from the top of the B stage. "He's tinier than ever," quoth Daniel, "and the smartest dandy that ever was seen. I shall be your Valentine, after all, Sally," pursued her swain; "for I could hide him with the shadow of my fist."

ONE of the most important personages in a small country town is the apothecary. He takes rank next after the rector and the attorney, and before the curate; and could be much less easily dispensed with than either of those worthies, not merely as holding "fate and physic" in his hand, but as the general, and as it were official, associate, adviser, comforter, and friend, of all ranks and all ages, of high and low, rich and poor, sick and well. I am no despiser of dignities; but twenty emperors shall be less intensely missed in their wide dominions than such a man as my friend John Hallett in his own small sphere.

This was Valentine's-eve. Valentine'smorn saw Sally eyeing the two rivals, through a peep-hole in her little check curtain, as they stood side by side, on the green, watching for the first glimpse of their divinity. Never was The spot which was favoured with the reseen such a contrast. Stephen, whose original sidence of this excellent person, was the small square dwarfishness had fined down into a town of Hazelby, in Dorsetshire; a pretty litminiature dandy-sallow, strutting, and all tle place, where every thing seems at a standover small-the very Tom Thumb of appren- still. It was originally built in the shape of tices! — Daniel, taller, bigger, ruddier, and the letter T; a long broad market-place (still heartier than ever-the actual Goliath of coun- so called, although the market be gone) servtry lads! Never was such a contrast seen. ing for the perpendicular stem, traversed by a At length Sally, laughing, blushing, and bri- straight, narrow, horizontal street, to answer dling, sallied forth from the cottage her huge for the top line. Not one addition has occurroll basket, but not as usual filled with rolls, red to interrupt this architectural regularity carried, not on her head, but in her hands. since; some fifty years ago, a rich London "I'm your Valentine, Sally! am I not?" ex- tradesman built, at the west end of the horiclaimed Daniel Tubb, darting towards her, zontal street, a wide-fronted single house, "you saw me first; I know you saw me first,' ," with two low wings, iron palisades before, continued the ardent lover, proceeding to claim and a fish-pond opposite, which still goes by the salute usual on such occasions. "Pshaw! the name of New Place, and is balanced, at nonsense! let me alone then, Daniel, can't the east end of the street, by an erection of you?" was the reply of his mistress, advanc- nearly the same date, a large, square, dingy ing to Stephen, who perhaps dazzled by the mansion, enclosed within high walls, inhabitbeauty, perhaps astounded by the height of ed by three maiden sisters, and called, probathe fair giantess, remained motionless and bly by way of nickname, the Nunnery. New speechless on the other side of the road. Place being on the left of the road, and the "Would you like a ride in my basket this fine Nunnery on the right, the T has now somemorning, Mr. Stephen?" said the saucy lass, thing the air of the Italic capital T, turned up emptying all his gifts, garters, pincushions, at one end and down on the other. The latest ribbons, and Valentines, from their huge reser- improvements are the bow-window in the marvoir, and depositing it on the ground at his ket-place, commanding the pavement both feet. "Don't be afraid; I'll be bound to carry ways, which the late brewer, Andrews, threw you as easily as the little Italian boy carries out in his snug parlour some twenty years his tray of images. He's not half the weight back, and where he used to sit smoking, with of the rolls-is he, Daniel?" pursued the the sash up, in summer afternoons, enjoying unmerciful beauty. "For my part, I think he himself, good man; and the great room at the has grown shorter.-Come, do step in!" And, Swan, originally built by the speculative pubwith the word, the triumphant Daniel lifted lican, Joseph Allwright, for an assemblyup the discomfited beau, placed him safely in room. That speculation did not answer. The the basket, and hoisted the burthen on Sally's assembly, in spite of canvassing and patronhead to the unspeakable diversion of that age, and the active exertions of all the young saucy maiden, and the complete cure of Mas- ladies in the neighbourhood, dwindled away ter Stephen's love.-No need, after this, to and died at the end of two winters: then it declare which of the two rivals is Sally North's became a club-room for the hunt; but the hunt

quarrelled with Joseph's cookery: then a market-room for the farmers; but the farmers (it was the high-price time) quarrelled with Joseph's wine: then it was converted into the magistrate's room-the bench; but the bench and the market went away together, and there was an end of justicing: then Joseph tried the novel attraction (to borrow a theatrical phrase) of a billiard-table; but, alas! that novelty succeeded as ill as if it had been theatrical: there were not customers enough to pay the marker: at last, it has merged finally in that unconscious receptacle of pleasure and pain, a post-office; although Hazelby has so little to do with traffic of any sort-even the traffic of correspondence that a saucy mailcoach will often carry on its small bag, and as often forget to call for the London bag in

return.

tight muslin stock; a costume which he had adopted in his younger days in imitation of the most eminent physician of the next city, and continued to the time of his death. Perhaps the cough might have been originally an imitation, also, ingrafted on the system by habit. It had a most unsatisfactory sound, and seemed more like a trick than a real effort of nature. His talk was civil, prosy, and fidgety, much addicted to small scandal, and that kind of news which passes under the denomination of tittle-tattle. He was sure to tell one half of the town where the other drank tea, and recollected the blancmangers and jellies on a supper-table, or described a new gown, with as much science and unction as if he had been used to make jellies and wear gowns in his own person. Certain professional peculiarities might have favoured the supposition. His mode of practice was exactly that popularly attributed to old women. He delighted in innocent remedies-manna, magnesia, and camphor julep; never put on a blister in his life; and would sooner, from pure complaisance, let a patient die, than administer an unpalatable prescription.

So qualified, to say nothing of his gifts in tea-drinking, casino, and quadrille (whist was too many for him), his popularity could not be questioned. When he expired, all Hazelby mourned. The lamentation was general. The women of every degree (to borrow a phrase from that great phrase-monger, Horace Walpole) "cried quarts;" and the procession to the church-yard that very church-yard to which he had himself followed so many of his patients-was now attended by all of them that remained alive.

In short, Hazelby is an insignificant place; -my readers will look for it in vain in the map of Dorsetshire; it is omitted, poor dear town!-left out by the map-maker with as little remorse as a dropped letter!—and it is also an old-fashioned place. It has not even a cheap shop for female gear. Every thing in the one store which it boasts, kept by Martha Deane, linen-draper and haberdasher, is dear and good as things were wont to be. You may actually get there thread made of flax, from the gouty, uneven, clumsy, shiny fabric, yclept whited-brown, to the delicate commodity of Lisle, used for darning muslin. I think I was never more astonished than when, on asking, from the mere force of habit, for thread, I was presented, instead of the pretty lattice-wound balls or snowy reels of cotton, with which that demand is usually answered, with a whole drawerful of skeins, peeping from their plue papers-such skeins as in my youth a thrifty maiden would draw into the nicely-stitched compartments of that silken repository, a housewife, or fold into a congeries of graduated thread-papers, "fine by degrees and beautifully less." The very literature of Hazelby is doled out at the pastry-covered with shaggy brown hair, sticking out cook's, in a little one-windowed shop, kept by Matthew Wise. Tarts occupy one end of the counter, and reviews the other; whilst the shelves are parcelled out between books, and dolls, and gingerbread. It is a question, by which of his trades poor Matthew gains least; he is so shabby, so threadbare, and so starved.

It was felt that the successor of Mr. Simon Shutter would have many difficulties to encounter. My friend, John Hallett, "came, and saw, and overcame.' John was what is usually called a rough diamond. Imagine a short, clumsy, stout-built figure, almost as broad as it is long, crowned by a bullet-head,

in every direction; the face round and solid, with a complexion originally fair, but dyed one red by exposure to all sorts of weather; open good-humoured eyes of a greenish cast, his admirers called them hazel; a wide mouth, full of large white teeth; a cocked-up nose, and a double chin; bearing altogether a strong resemblance to a print which I once saw hangSuch a town would hardly have known ing up in an alehouse parlour, of "the celewhat to do with a highly-informed and edu-brated divine” (to use the identical words of cated surgeon, such as one now generally sees in that most liberal profession. My friend, John Hallett, suited it exactly. His predecessor, Mr. Simon Shuter, had been a small, wrinkled, spare old gentleman, with a short cough and a thin voice, who always seemed as if he needed an apothecary himself. He wore generally a full suit of drab, a flaxen wig of the sort called a Bob Jerom, and a very

the legend) "Doctor Martin Luther."

The condition of a country apothecary being peculiarly liable to the inclemency of the season, John's dress was generally such as might bid defiance to wind or rain, or snow or hail. If any thing, he wrapt up most in the summer, having a theory that people were never so apt to take cold as in hot weather. He usually wore a bearskin great-coat, a silk handkerchief

over his cravat, top boots on those sturdy pillars his legs, a huge pair of overalls, and a hat, which, from the day in which it first came into his possession to that in which it was thrown aside, never knew the comfort of being freed from its oilskin-never was allowed to display the glossy freshness of its sable youth. Poor dear hat! how its vanity (if hats have vanity) must have suffered! For certain its owner had none, unless a lurking pride in his own bluffness and bluntness may be termed such. He piqued himself on being a plain downright Englishman, and on a voice and address pretty much like his apparel, rough, strong, and warm, and fit for all weathers. A heartier person never lived.

tagious cachinnation that ever was heard. Nothing in the shape of fun came amiss to him. He would join in a catch or roar out a solo, which might be heard a mile off; would play at hunt the slipper, or blindman's-buff; was a great man in a country dance, and upon very extraordinary occasions would treat the company to a certain remarkable hornpipe, which put the walls in danger of tumbling about their ears, and belonged to him as exclusively as the Hazelby sauce. It was a sort of parody on a pas seul which he had once seen at the Opera-house, in which his face, his figure, his costume, his rich humour, and his strange, awkward, unexpected activity, told amazingly. "The force of frolic could no further go," than "the Doctor's hornpipe." It was the climax of jollity.

In his profession he was eminently skilful, bold, confident, and successful. The neighbouring physicians liked to come after Mr. But the chief scene of Mr. Hallett's gaiety Hallett; they were sure to find nothing to lay out of doors, in a very beautiful spot, undo. And blunt and abrupt as was his called the Down, a sloping upland, about a general manner, he was kind and gentle in a mile from Hazelby; a side view of which, sick-room; only nervous disorders, the pet with its gardens and orchards, its pretty church diseases of Mr. Simon Shuter, he could not peeping from amongst lime and yew trees, abide. He made short work with them; and the fine piece of water, called Hazelby frightened them away, as one does by children Pond, it commanded. The Down itself was when they have the hiccough; or if the malady an extensive tract of land covered with the were pertinacious and would not go, he fairly finest verdure, backed by a range of hills, and turned off the patient. Once or twice, indeed, surrounded by coppice-woods, large patches on such occasions, the patient got the start, of which were scattered over the turf, like so and turned him off; Mrs. Emery, for instance, many islands on an emerald sea. Nothing the lady's maid at New Place, most delicate could be more beautiful or more impenetrable and mincing of waiting-gentlewomen, mo- than these thickets; they were principally tioned him from her presence; and Miss composed of birch, holly, hawthorn, and Deane, daughter of Martha Deane, haber- maple, woven together by garlands of wooddasher, who, after completing her education bine, interwreathed and intertwisted by bramat a boarding-school, kept a closet full of mil-ble and briar, till even the sheep, although linery in a little den behind her mamma's the bits of their snowy fleece left on the shop, and was by many degrees the finest bushes bore witness to the attempt, could lady in Hazelby, was so provoked at being told by him that nothing ailed her, that, to prove her weakly condition, she pushed him by main force out of doors.

With these exceptions Mr. Hallett was the delight of the whole town, as well as of all the farm-houses within six miles round. He just suited the rich yeomanry, cured their diseases, and partook of their feasts; was constant at christenings, and a man of prime importance at weddings. A country merrymaking was nothing without "the Doctor." He was "the very prince of good fellows;" had a touch of epicurism, which, without causing any distaste of his own homely fare, made dainties acceptable when they fell in his way; was a most absolute carver; prided himself upon a sauce of his own invention, for fish and game-" Hazelby sauce" he called it; and was universally admitted to be the best compounder of a bowl of punch in the country. Besides these rare convivial accomplishments, his gay and jovial temper rendered him the life of the table. There was no resisting his droll faces, his droll stories, his jokes, his tricks, or his laugh-the most con

make no way in the leafy mass. Here and there a huge oak or beech rose towering above the rich underwood; and all around, as far as the eye could pierce, the borders of this natural shrubbery were studded with a countless variety of woodland flowers. When the old thorns were in blossom, or when they were succeeded by the fragrant woodbine and the delicate briar-rose, it was like a garden, if it were possible to fancy any garden so peopled with birds.*

The only human habitation on this charming

tory occurred for several successive years on this * A circumstance of some curiosity in natural hisdown. There was constantly in one of the thickets a blackbird's nest, of which the young were distinguished by a striking peculiarity. The old birds (probut the plumage of their progeny was milk-white, as bably the same pair,) were of the usual sable colour, white as a swan, without a single discoloured feather. They were always taken, and sold at high prices to the curious in such freaks of nature. The late bishop of Winchester had a pair of them for a long time in the male was a fine song-bird; but all attempts to the aviary at Farnhain Castle; they were hardy, and breed from them failed. They died, "and left the world no copy."

spot was the cottage of the shepherd, old ther knick-knacky in his tastes; a great patron Thomas Tolfrey, who, with his grand-daugh- of small inventions, such as the improved neter, Jemima, a light pretty maiden of fourteen, plus-ultra cork-screw, and the latest patent tended the flocks on the Down; and the rustic snuffers. He also trifled with horticulture, carols of this little lass and the tinkling of the dabbled in tulips, was a connoisseur in pinks, sheep-bells were usually the only sounds that and had gained a prize for polyanthuses. The mingled with the sweet songs of the feathered garden was under the especial care of his prettribes. On May-days and holidays, however, ty niece, Miss Margaret, a grateful, warmthe thickets resounded with other notes of hearted girl, who thought she never could do glee than those of the linnet and the wood- enough to please her good uncle, and prove lark. Fairs, revels, May-games, and cricket- her sense of his kindness. He was indeed as matches-all were holden on the Down; and fond of her as if he had been her father, and there would John Hallett sit, in his glory, as kind. universal umpire and referee of cricketer, wrestler, or back-sword player, the happiest and greatest man in the field. Little Jemima never failed to bring her grandfather's armchair, and place it under the old oak for the good doctor; I question whether John would have exchanged his throne for that of the king of England.

On these occasions he certainly would have been the better for that convenience, which he piqued himself on not needing-a partner. Generally speaking, he really, as he used to boast, did the business of three men; but when a sickly season and a Maying happened to come together, I cannot help suspecting that the patients had the worst of it. Perhaps, however, a partner might not have suited him. He was sturdy and independent to the verge of a fault, and would not have brooked being called to account, or brought to a reckoning by any man under the sun; still less would he endure the thought of that more important and durable co-partnery-marriage. He was a most determined bachelor; and so afraid of being mistaken for a wooer, or encouraging the reputation of a gay deceiver, that he was as uncivil as his good-nature would permit to every unwedded female from sixteen to sixty, and had nearly fallen into some scrapes on that account with the spinsters of the town, accustomed to the soft silkiness of Mr. Simon Shuter; but they got used to it-it was the man's way; and there was an indirect flattery in his fear of their charms, which the maiden ladies, especially the elder ones, found very mollifying; so he was forgiven.

Perhaps there was nothing very extraordinary in his goodness to the gentle and cheerful little girl who kept his walks so trim and his parlour so neat, who always met him with a smile, and who (last and strongest tie to a generous mind,) was wholly dependent on him- had no friend on earth but himself. There was nothing very uncommon in that. But John Hallett was kind to every one, even where the sturdy old English prejudices, which he cherished as virtues, might seem most likely to counteract his gentler feelings. One instance of his benevolence and his delicacy shall conclude this sketch.

Several years ago an old French emigré came to reside at Hazelby. He lodged at Matthew Wise's, of whose twofold shop for cakes and novels I have before made honourable mention, in the low three-cornered room, with a closet behind it, which Matthew had the impudence to call his first floor. Little was known of him but that he was a thin, pale, foreign-looking gentleman, who shrugged his shoulders in speaking, took a great deal of snuff, and made a remarkably low bow. The few persons with whom he had any communication spoke with amusement of his bad English, and with admiration of his good-humour; and it soon appeared, from a written paper placed in a conspicuous part of Matthew's shop, that he was an Abbé, and that he would do himself the honour of teaching French to any of the nobility or gentry of Hazelby who might think fit to employ him. Pupils dropt in rather slowly. The curate's daughters, and the attorney's son, and Miss Deane the milliner-but she found the lanIn his shop and his household he had no guage difficult, and left off, asserting that M. need either of partner or wife: the one was l'Abbé's snuff made her nervous. At last excellently managed by an old rheumatic jour-poor M. l'Abbé fell ill himself, really ill, danneyman, slow in speech and of vinegar aspect, gerously ill, and Matthew Wise went in all who had been a pedagogue in his youth, and haste to summon Mr. Hallett. Now Mr. Halnow used to limp about with his Livy in his lett had such an aversion to a Frenchman, in pocket, and growl as he compounded the general, as a cat has to a dog; and was wont medicines over the bad latinity of the pre- to erect himself into an attitude of defiance scriptions; the other was equally well con- and wrath at the mere sight of the object of ducted by an equally ancient housekeeper and his antipathy. He hated and despised the a cherry-cheeked niece, the orphan daughter whole nation, abhorred the language, and of his only sister, who kept every thing with-"would as lief," he assured Matthew, "have in doors in the bright and shining order in been called in to a toad." He went, howwhich he delighted. John Hallett, notwith-ever, grew interested in the case, which was standing the roughness of his aspect, was ra- difficult and complicated; exerted all his