whistle cannot be the prompter's, and what we look upon is not one of the scenic illusions we at first took it for. What else then may it be? and to what end designed? The gate of entrance is open; there is nobody to say us nay; we will enter, and examine the scene a little more closely.

A broad, gravelled, carriage-road, but without a single mark of carriage-wheel to impeach the perfection of its level, leads windingly up a gentle ascent, either side of it being bounded by a raised footway of green, smooth-shaven turf, immediately adjoining the inner extremity of which rise the fanciful trellised boundaries, no two alike in pattern, of certain diminutive flower-gardens, growing diminutive flowers, and leading respectively to as many diminutive dwellings, no one of which has anything in common with its neighbour, except the marked resemblance that each and all of them bear to the pretty plaster of Paris light-houses that the Italian

image-boys carry about London streets on; their heads.

Looking at each of these fairy-habitations separately, you fancy yourself peering, with one eye, through the peep-hole of those ingenious show-boxes by which certain housebeautifiers in Old Bond Street inveigle the unwary a long way from home "in search of the picturesque." Looking at the whole together, you may fancy them the deserted domiciles (got together by some strange magic) of all those youthful visionaries of the last London season, who commenced their married life with amiable idealities about "love in a cottage," and, being able to afford it, corrected their error before the end of the honeymoon.

And yet the unsullied brightness of every window, the immaculate whiteness of every drapery within, the perfect preservation of every flower and leaf without, not to mention the blue smoke that rises gracefully from

the graceful chimnies of some few of these dwellings, forbid all idea of desertion. We must guess again.

Perhaps, then, the singular scene on which we look is the last, best work-the opus magnum―(carried into effect by favour of his friend the Duke) of a certain Prince Prettyman of the May-fair coteries of the last century, who, having come to his fortune after long waiting for it, felt that he must die immediately (as every body does under such circumstances), and being determined not to do so without benefiting his species, hit upon this method, in the shape of alms-houses for decayed dandies.

The guess is a happy one: but it evidently misses the mark. Were it as you suppose, the drawing-room window of each domicile (it being a soft summer's evening) would present the velvet-capped head, leaning on the jewelled hand, of its respective occupant, -as that of poor Brummel ever did under

similar circumstances, when he lodged over the little bookseller's shop in the Rue Royale at Calais. Whereas, here, there is no touch or sign of human or any other life; all is silent and motionless as the villages we wander through in dreams.

Yet not so. See! the window-sill, (till now vacant,) round which cluster those lovely roses of Provence and honey-suckles of England, is occupied by a snow-white cat. Can it be? Have we at last found or lost our way to the long-sought domain of the transformed princess in the prettiest of fairy tales? Instead of being, as we fancied ourselves, close to Chatsworth Palace, are we "fifteen thousand miles from everywhere;”— as Planché's pretty version of the tale intimates that fairy residence to be situated?

Reader or spectator of the unique scene that has so inopportunely stopped us in our progress, thy conjectures as to its use or destination would never hit the mark, shouldst thou guess till doomsday.

You give it up?

Learn, then, that this romance in stucco is neither more nor less than a real village, inhabited by real peasants and labourers, who, like other peasants and labourers, "live by bread," (ay, and bacon too, "though by your smiling you would seem to doubt it);" getting that bread and bacon by the sweat of their brow; growing their own cabbages and potatoes, (somewhere out of sight); brewing their own beer; marrying, multiplying, and performing all the other offices of ordinary men and women in the like station.

But no-the blank silence that reigns everywhere throughout this seemingly favoured spot, even now that the labours of the day are over, proclaims something apart from ordinary village life-something, if not wrong, too right, about this rural La Trappe,-where the men, and the women too, seem to have forgotten how to talk, the dogs how to bark, the cats how to mew, and even the birds how