THE SLINGSBY PAPERS. THE SLINGSBYS IN GENERAL. THANK God I am once again in the country! Here in my own sweet, quiet, old home. No crowded thoroughfares, no rattling of carriages, no flaring shops, no morning cries, no midnight tumults, no stifling smoke to disturb and offend me. All is peace, solitude, and purity. Nature above me and around me. "Here, dear Bridget, take my over-coat; and stay, you may as well carry this new city garment with you too, and be sure you leave them both all night before the smouldering turf in the kitchen grate; they have a villainous odour of coal gas upon them that sickens me. There now, give me my old 'Newmarket,' and I will run out for a few minutes, to see all the dear old things smiling a welcome on me before the sunlight fades away below Knockduvh. Then, hey, for dinner and an evening of pleasant thoughts by my own fireside!" In the name of all that is preposterous-so ran my musings, as, in the luxury of after-dinner indolence, I stretched out my legs till my feet touched the billet of bog-oak that was blazing brightly on the hearth-in the name of all that is preposterous, what could have induced mankind to build cities and dwell therein? The first murderer was also the first builder of a city! And what marvel. He had gone "forth from the presence of the Lord," and the ground would not yield unto him her strength when he tilled it; and he feared to be in the solitude of the holy earth-alone with God and his own soul. B So he built Enoch and gathered his race around him. And thus cities arose and multiplied, and human souls and human bodies grew, like trees in the dense forest, close and sweltering together, shutting out the glory of heaven, the fresh breeze and the soft rain; rubbing and chafing each other, and wearing away bark and leaf in their ceaseless struggle, and generating rank, noxious vapours as they died and putrified where they fell. But the country is man's true inheritance-conferred by God, renewed by Nature: all-delighting, all-sufficing. Then I repeated some verses from Philemon, which you shall have in English, lest you should call me a pedant. "The country is man's most congenial home. The olive, and the fig, and the vine, corn and sweet honey-these man needs and Nature gives him in her fields; but vases of gold and silver, purple and fine linen-these are for the pageantry of the world, and not for the wants of life." Some We Slingsbys are, almost to a man, country folks. of our women, to be sure, in obedience to the social obligation of the great marriage contract, have gone off at various times and settled in towns with their husbands; but they, too, contrive to keep the flavour of the country about them, renewing it from time to time by visits to the ancient family seat, and every now and then manage to adjust matters so as to give their progeny the privilege of a rural birth. We boast, likewise, of being an ancient and respectable clan; but, like many other families, our origin, either through the carelessness of chroniclers or the unambitious characters of our ancestors, is lost in the mists of antiquity. Whether we be descendants of any of the Yorkshire Slingsbys I know not, though I am disposed to think, from the remarkably defective development of the organ of acquisitiveness and caution in our Irish craniums, that we cannot claim any ethnological affinity with the very acute inhabitants of that celebrated shire; yet, certes, we have on our armorial bearings a chevron between two leopard's heads, and two hunting horns in base argent. But what of that? These be things which any one may have by some means or other. I never yet knew a man with so much as a silver spoon who was at fault for a heraldric hyrogliph to display upon it. If he have not arms of Concession, or Adoption, or Assumption, he |