Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 039.djvu/497

 why I am singled out for this offensive question. Good morning, Sir."

For the soul of me I could not perceive where lay the offence; but, meeting him the next morning, I resolved to request of him a solution of the mystery,

"My dear Mr. Techy," said I, "I give you my word that, when I asked you the age of Raphael Morghen, I had no idea of offending you: but he, being a celebrated engraver, I thought you were the most likely person to—"

"Sir," he replied, (and as he spoke his yellow face reddened, and his head seemed to he growing out and away from his shoulders with indignation,)—"Sir, this is adding insult to injury."

From that instant I never saw him more.

But soon an affront was to be put upon him for which no apology would be offered. He had eaten voraciously of a sour gooseberry pudding. At two o'clock on the following morning he was taken violently ill, and, before ten, Simon Techy was no more! His last faint words were—"We must all die—I am resigned to my fate—but it is very humiliating—to one's dignity and self-respect—to be taken off—without reasonable notice—and—by so undignified a thing, too, as a gooseberry dumpling!" P*.

it is not made to last, The dream which haunts my soul; The shadow even now is cast Which soon will wrap the whole.

Ah! waking dreams that mock the day Have other end than those, Which come beneath the moonlight ray, And charm the eyes they close.

The vision colouring the night ‘Mid bloom and brightness wakes, Banished by morning's cheerful light, Which gladdens while it breaks.

But dreams which fix the waking eye With deeper spells than sleep, When hours unnoted pass us by, From such we wake and weep.

We wake,—but not to sleep again; The heart has lost its youth,— The morning light which wakes us then, Calm, cold, and stern, is Truth.

I know all this, and yet I yield My spirit to the snare, And gather flowers upon the field, Though Woe and Fate are there.

The maid divine, who bound her wreath On Etna's fatal plain, Knew not the foe that lurked beneath The summer-clad domain.