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the fare threw herself into my arms for protection, amidst the pleasing horrors of an overthrow.

"As an affair of mere breath, there is something tangible in a London fog. In the evanescent air of Italy, a man might as well not breathe at all, for any thing he knows of the matter. But in a wellmixed metropolitan fog, there is something substantial and satisfying. You can feel what you breathe, and see it too. It is like breathing water, as we may suppose the fishes to do. And then the taste of it, when dashed with a due seasoning of seacoal smoke, is far from insipid. It is also meat and drink at the same time: something between egg-flip and omelette souflée, but much more digestible than either. Not that I would recommend it medicinally, especially to persons of queasy stomachs, delicate nerves, and afflicted with bile. But for persons of a good ro

a side saddle, who, to his astonishment, presented a pistol, and demanded his money. In amazement he asked her what she meant, and received his answer from a genteel looking man, who coming to him on horseback, said he was a brute to deny the lady's request, and enforced this conviction by telling him that if he did not gratify her desire immediately be would shoot him through the head. The butcher could not resist an invitation to be gallant, when supported by such arguments, and he placed six guineas and his watch in her hands.*

FLORAL DIRECTORY."

Starry Stapelia. Stapelia radiata. Dedicated to St. John of the Cross.

November 25.

bust habit of body, and not dainty withal, St. Catharine. 3d Cent. St. Erasmus, or

(which such, by the by, never are,) there is nothing better in its way. And it wraps you all round like a cloak, too-a patent water-proof one, which no rain ever penetrated. No-I maintain that a real London fog is a thing not to be sneezed atif you help it. Mem. As many spurious imitations of the above are abroad, such as Scotch mists, and the like,-which are no less deleterious than disagreeable, please to ask for the 'true London particular,' as manufactured by Thames, Coalgas, Smoke, Steam, & Co. No others are genuine."

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Water-proof Boots and Shoes.

Take one pound of drying (boiled linseed) oil, two ounces of yellow wax, two ounces of spirits of turpentine, and one of Burgundy pitch, melted carefully over a slow fire. With this composition new shoes and boots are to be rubbed in the sun, or at a distance from the fire, with a small bit of sponge, as often as they become dry, until they are fully saturated; the leather then is impervious to wet, the shoes and boots last much longer, acquire softness and pliability, and thus prepared, are the most effectual preservatives against cold.

A Notable Woman.

On the 24th of November, 1735, a butcher near Rumford, in Essex, was rode up to by a women well mounted on

Elme.

St. Catharine.

This saint is in the church of England calendar, and the almanacs. It is doubtful whether she ever existed; yet in massbooks and breviaries, we find her prayed to and honoured by hymns, with stories of her miracles so wonderfully apocryphal that even cardinal Baronius blushes for the threadbare legends. In Alban Butler's memoirs of this saint, it may be discovered by a scrutinizing eye, that while her popularity seems to force him to relate particulars concerning her, he leaves himself room to disavow them; but this is hardly fair, for the great body of readers of his "Lives of the Saints," are too confiding to criticise hidden meanings. "From this martyr's uncommon erudition," he says, "and the extraordinary spirit of piety by which she sanctified her learning, and the use she made of it, she is chosen, in the schools, the patroness and model of christian philosophers." According to his authorities she was beheaded under the emperor Maxentius, or Maximinus II. He adds, "She is said first to have been put upon an engine made of four wheels joined together, and stuck with sharp pointed spikes, that when the wheels were moved her body might be torn to pieces. The acts add, that at the first stirring of the terrible engine, the cords with which the martyr

* Gentleman's Magazine.

1

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St. Catharine and the Emperor Maxentius.

FROM A STAINED GLASS WINDOW IN WEST WICKHAM CHURCH, KENT, 1825.

was tied, were broke asunder by the invisible power of an angel, and, the engine falling to pieces by the wheels being separated from one another, she was delivered from that death. Hence, the name of "St. Catharine's wheel."

The Catharine-wheel, a sign in the Borough, and at other inns and public houses, and the Catharine-wheel in fireworks, testify this saint's notoriety in England. Besides pictures and engravings representing her pretended marriage with Christ, others, which are more numerous, represent her with her wheel. She was, in common with other papal saints, also painted in churches, and there is still a very fine, though somewhat mutilated, painting of her, on the glass window in the chancel of the church of West Wickham, a village delightfully situated in Kent, between Bromley and Croydon. The editor of the Every-Day Book went thither, and took a tracing from the window itself, and now presents an engraving from that tracing, under the expectation that, as an ornament, it may be acceptable to all, and, as perpetuating a relic of antiquity, be still more acceptable to a few. The figure under St Catharine's feet is the tyrant Maxentius. In this church there are other fine and perfect remains of the beautifully painted glass which anciently adorned it. A coach leaves the Ship, at Charing-cross, every afternoon for the Swan, at West Wickham, which is kept by Mr. Crittel, who can give a visiter a good bed, good cheer, and good information, and if need be, put a good horse into a good stable. A short and pleasant walk of a mile to the church the next morning will be gratifying in many ways. The village is one of the most retired and agreeable spots in the vicinity of the metropolis. It is not yet deformed by building speculations.

St. Catharine's Day.

Old Barnaby Googe, from Naogeorgus, says

"What should I tell what sophisters
on Cathrins day devise?

Or else the superstitious toyes,
that maisters exercise."

Anciently women and girls in Ireland kept a fast every Wednesday and Saturday throughout the year, and some of them also on St. Catharine's day; nor would they omit it though it happened on their birthday, or they were ever so ill. The reason given for it was that the girls might get good husbands, and the women better ones, either by the death, desertion, or reformation of their living ones.*

St. Catharine was esteemed the saint and patroness of spinsters, and her holiday observed by young women meeting on this day, and making merry together, which they call "Cathar'ning."+ Something of this still remains in remote parts of England.

man

Our correspondent R. R. (in November, 1825,) says, "On the 25th of November, St. Catharine's day, a dressed in woman's clothes, with a large wheel by his side, to represent St. Catharine, was brought out of the royal arsenal at Woolwich, (by the workmen of that place,) about six o'clock in the evening, seated in a large wooden chair, and carried by men round the town, with attendants, &c. similar to St. Clement's. They stopped at different houses, where they used to recite a speech; but this ceremony has been discontinued these last eight or nine years."

Much might be said and contemplated in addition to the notice already taken of the demolition of the church of St. Catharine's, near the Tower. Its destruction has commenced, is proceeding, and will be completed in a short time. The surrender of this edifice will, in the end, become a precedent for a spoliation imagined by very few on the day when he utters this foreboding..

25th of November, 1825.

FLORAL DIRECTORY. Sweet Butter-bur. Tussilago fragrans Dedicated to St. Catharine.

* Camden Brit.

+ La Motte on Poetry and Painting, 1730, 12mo.

November 26.

St. Peter, Martyr, Bp. of Alexandria, A. D. 311,St. Nicon, surnamed Metanoite, A.D. 998. St. Sylvester Gozzolini, A. D. St. Conrad, Bp. of Constance,

1267.

A. D. 976.

and "

A NEW MOON CUSTOM,
more last words" respecting
CAPTAIN STARKEY.

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book.
Sir,

I do not remember to have seen in
your book, "where every-day we turn
the leaf to read," any notice of a custom,
which is not only very prevalent, but
which is, also, most harmless in its na
ture and endearing in its tendency-pro-
motes in its practice goodwill and good
humour-and, not unfrequently, with
those who view the "future i th' in-
stant," love itself. Among the many
new moon customs, such as looking
through a new silk handkerchief to ascer-
tuin the number of your lovers, feeling
for money in your pocket, to see if you
will have a lucky month, &c.; I know of
none so pleasant, or, to my thinking, so
rational, as that of claiming the FIRST
KISS FOR A PAIR OF NEW GLOVES! The
person, in a company, male or female,
who first gets a glimpse of the new
moon, immediately kisses some member
of the company, and
pronounces with a
triumphant chuckle, Aha! Jane, (or
as the name may be,) there's a pair of
gloves for me!" By this means a plea
sant interruption is often given to à te-
dious tale, or uninteresting debate, and a
new subject starts, in which all may join
with greater or less avidity. How happy
is some modest youth, should the blushing
and ingenuous girl, whom he has secretly
"singled from the world," have laid him
under the penalty of a pair of new
gloves, by that soft phrase and that first
delicious kiss-how fruitful are his sweet
anticipations of that golden time-

"When life is all one dream of love and

flowers."

How joyful is an amiable sister, if, by
this 'species of initiation, she has been
enabled to re-conciliate the vagrant affec-
tions of some estranged brother; and
even where love and sisterly feelings are
out of the question, viewed as an inter-
change of common (common!) friend

ship, between the sexes, how felicitous is

it in effect and operation! Should you,
Mr. Editor, be of opinion with me, re-
specting this no longer" tyrant custom,"
you may, possibly, by printing this letter,
be productive of much good humour, and
a pair of new gloves.
I am,

Your constant and approving reader,
W. G. T.

Newcastle-on-Tyne.

P. S. I cannot write the name of the town where I reside, without feeling a strong inducement to say one word of him, who has been so pleasantly immortalized by yourself, and the inimitable being who wrote so affectingly of "Rosamund Gray," and the "Old Familiar Faces"-I mean poor Starkey. I was born, and have lived all my life (not a long one), in the town where he terminated his humble career, and gave another name to the neglected and unpitied list of those, who seem chiefly to have entered the world for the purpose

of swelling

"The short and simple annals of the

poor,"

and my earliest recollections are haunted
by his meagre care-worn form;-many a
time have I shrunk from the shaking of
66 dem your
his stick, and the imperious
bluds," which he bestowed with uncom-
mon celerity on the defenceless heads of
his young and unthinking sources of an-
noyance, as they assailed him from the
corners which he was accustomed to
pass. But the captain was a humble
man, and these "moods of the mind"
were seldom indulged in, save when he
was returning, brim-full of brief and in-
temperate importance, from the Black
Horse, in Pilgrim-street, the tap-room of
which was the scene of many a learned
disputation with the "unwashed arti-
ficers" of the evening, and in which the
captain was always proportionably bril-
liant to the number of gills he had
drank. On these occasions, in his efforts
to silence the sons of toil, he did not
scruple to use his Latin-and, in such
instances, appeal was impossible, and
victory sure. Among several anecdotes,
I am in possession of two, which you, his
most celebrious biographer, may not
think unworthy of recording. On one
evening, when he was returning from a
carousal, furnished by the generosity of
friends, or his own indiscretion-for the
captain despised to-morrow as much as

any man, and was fully convinced of the propriety of the apophthegm," sufficient unto the day is its own evil"-he found the gate of the Freemen's Hospital, where he resided, closed, and no one in a better condition for exclaiming with Dr. Beattie,

"Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb!"

than himself. What was to be done? To fly over was impossible-and he was much too deep in the scale of intoxication to dream of scaling the wall. A party of young bucks," ripe for fun," fresh from their sacrifices at the shrine of "the reeling goddess with the zoneless waist," came up the street; to these, hat in hand, did the captain prefer his petition to be assisted over, and they, with a thoughtlessness hardly to be excused by their condition, took him up, and threw him completely on to the grass plot on the other side. The veteran scrambled to his legs, and, for the wall was not very high on the inside, returned them thanks in his best manner for their timely assistance, utterly forgetful that it might have proved most disastrous both to himself and them. The second, and with which I must conclude a postscript which has already far outgrown the letter, was less harmless and equally illustrative of the man. He had gone, with another eleemosynary worthy, on some gratulatory occasion, to the hall of one of the

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members for the town, and the butler, who was well aware of the object of his guests, treated them handsomely in his refectory to cold beef and good ale. He was accidentally called away, and the two friends were left alone. Alas! for the temptations which continually beset us! The "expedition of" the captain's "violent love outran the pauser, reason:" he suggested, and both adopted, the expedient of secreting a slice or two of the member's beef, to make more substantial the repast of the evening. Starkey's share was deposited in his hat. The man in office returned, pressed his visiters afresh," and still the circling cup was drained," until the homebrewed had made considerable innovations, and the travellers thought it fitting to depart. The captain's habitual politeness was an overmatch for his cunning: whilst he was yet at the door, casting his " last lingering looks behind," he must needs take off his hat to give more effect to the fervour of his farewellwhen-" out upon 't"-the beef fell as flat on his oration, as did the hat of corporal Trim on the floor in the scene of his eloquence. Starkey was dumb-founded, his associate was in agonies, and the butler was convulsed with the most "sidesplitting" laughter. The captain, like other great men, has not fallen "unsung." Hearken to Gilchrist, one of the "bards of the Tyne," who thus sings in his apotheosis of Benjamin Starkey:—

"His game is up, his pipe is out, an' fairly laid his craw, His fame 'ill blaw about just like coal dust at Shiney-Raw. He surely was a joker rare-what times there'd been for a' the nation, Had he but lived to be a mayor, the glory o' wor corporation! "Whack, &c."

W. G. T.

FLORAL DIRECTORY.

Linear Wood Sorrel. Oxalis linearis. Dedicated to St. Conrad.

November 27.

St. Maximus, Bp. of Riez, A. d. 460. St. James, surnamed Intercisus, A. D. 421. St. Maharsapor, A. D. 421. St. Virgil, Bp. of Saltzburg, A. D. 784. St. Se cundin, or Seachnal, Bp. of Dunsaghlin, in Meath, A. D. 447.

ANNIVERSARY OF

The Great Storm

IN ENGLAND.

In Little Wild-street chapel, Lincoln's Inn Fields, a sermon is annually preached on this day in commemoration of the "GREAT STORM" in 1703.

This fearful tempest was preceded by a strong west wind, which set in about the middle of the month; and every day, and almost every hour, increased in force until

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