he sees a soldierly looking woman, with her outer skirts tucked up, come forth with a small wooden tub, and in that tub commence a whisking and a splashing on the margin of the pavement, Mr George says to himself, “She’s as usual, washing greens. I never saw her, except upon a baggage-waggon, when she wasn’t washing greens!”

The subject of this reflection is at all events so occupied in washing greens at present, that she remains unsuspicious of Mr George’s approach; until, lifting up herself and her tub together, when she has poured the water off into the gutter, she finds him standing near her. Her reception of him is not flattering.

“George, I never see you, but I wish you was a hundred mile away!”

The trooper, without remarking on this welcome, follows into the musical instrument shop, where the lady places her tub of greens upon the counter, and having shaken hands with him, rests her arms upon it.

“I never,” she says, “George, consider Matthew Bagnet safe a minute when you’re near him. You are that restless and that roving—”

“Yes! I know I am, Mrs Bagnet. I know I am.”

“You know you are!” says Mrs Bagnet. “What’s the use of that? Why are you?”

“The nature of the animal, I suppose,” returns the trooper good-humouredly.

“Ah!” cries Mrs Bagnet, something shrilly. “but what satisfaction will the nature of the animal be to me, when the animal shall have tempted my Mat away from the musical business to New Zealand or Australey?”

Mrs Bagnet is not at all an ill-looking woman. Rather large-boned, a little coarse in the grain, and freckled by the sun and wind which have tanned her hair upon the forehead; but healthy, wholesome, and bright- eyed. A strong, busy, active, honest-faced woman, of from forty-five to fifty. Clean, hardy, and so economically dressed (though substantially), that the only article of ornament of which she stands possessed appears to be her wedding ring; around which her finger has grown to be so large since it was put on, that it will never come off again until it shall mingle with Mrs Bagnet’s dust.

“Mrs Bagnet,” says the trooper, “I am on my parole with you. Mat will get no harm from me. You may trust me so far.”

“Well, I think I may. But the very looks of you are unsettling,” Mrs Bagnet rejoins. “Ah George, George! If you had only settled down, and married Joe Pouch’s widow when he died in North America, she’d have combed your hair for you.”

“It was a chance for me, certainly,” returns the trooper, half-laughingly, half-seriously, “but I shall never settle down into a respectable man now. Joe Pouch’s widow might have done me good — there was something in her — and something of her — but I couldn’t make up my mind to it. If I had had the luck to meet with such a wife as Mat found!”

Mrs Bagnet, who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve with a good sort of fellow, but to be another good sort of fellow herself for that matter, receives this compliment by flicking Mr George in the face with a head of greens, and taking her tub into the little room behind the shop.

“Why, Quebec, my poppet,” says George, following, on invitation, into that department. “And little Malta, too! Come and kiss your Bluffy!”

These young ladies — not supposed to have been actually christened by the names applied to them, though always so called in the family, from the places of their birth in barracks — are respectively employed on three-legged stools: the younger (some five or six years old), in learning her letters out of a penny