are the most unfeelingest of metal! What a lot of mangled bodies, and misery, and housebreaking, and wickedness of all sorts, carried on and made quite lawful by a uniform, may we see-if we choose to see at all-about the statue of what is called a conqueror! What a firing of houses, what shamethat, because you're a woman, I won't more particularly write about-we might look upon under the statue, that is only so high, because it has so much. wickedness to stand upon! If the statue could feel at all, wouldn't it put up its hands, and hide its face, although it was made of the best of bronze? But Mr Stephenson will look kindly and sweetly about him; he will know that he has carried comfort, and knowledge, and happiness to the doors of millions!-that, that he has brought men together, that they might know and love one another. This is something like having a statue! I'm sure of it-when George the Fourth is made to hear the news (for kings are so very long before the truth comes to 'em), he 'd like to gallop off to the first melter's and go at once into the nothing that men think him.

And besides all this, the railways have got a king! When you hear of a king in England, I know your old thoughts go down to Westminster Abbey, and you think of nothing but bishops and peers, and all that sort of thing, kissing the king's

cheeks, and the holy oil put upon the royal head, that the crown, I suppose, may sit the more comfortably upon it; but this is another sort of king, Mr King Hudson the First. I have read somewhere at a bookstall, that Napoleon was crowned with the Iron Crown of Italy. Well, King Hudson has been crowned with the Iron Crown of England!—a crown melted out of pig-iron, and made in a railway furnace.

I've somewhere seen the picture of the River Nile, that with the lifting of his finger made the river flow over barren land, and leave there all sorts of blessings. Well, King Hudson is of this sort; he has made the molten iron flow over all sorts of places, and so bring forth good fruits wherever it went.-So no more, from your affectionate grandson,

JUNIPER HEDGEHOG.

LETTER XXIII.-To Mrs Hedgehog, New York.

DEAR GRANDMOTHER,-Of course you must have heard of the potato blight. There are some subjects that women don't want newspapers to teach 'em about, and "potatoes is one." I can't tell how your red Yorks and Kidneys may be in

your part of the world: with us, they're things to weep over. But, of course, your potatoes are all right you've done nothing to bring down rot upon 'em from heaven. But it's very different with us, grandmother. Our potato blight was got up by her Majesty's Ministers, and-would you think it? -consented to by her blessed Majesty! It is now as plain as light that the great Maynooth has done it all! One William Ferrie-who writes in a hair shirt, with a girdle of tenpenny nails next his skin-has let out the terrible secret in the Witness, an Edinburgh paper (Nov. 8). He groans as follows:

"Had we set ourselves to consider by what display of His sovereignty the Lord could most throughly and very severely have distressed Ireland, whilst He in some degree afflicted also both England and Scotland, in token of His indignation at the sin of their joint rulers in enacting that which, whilst it insulted Him, was justified on the plea that it would benefit Ireland, could we have conceived a more effectual one than the blasting of the potato crop !"

Now, grandmother, this, I know, is stuff after your own heart. Popery is at the root of the root! The Lord has been insulted; and His terrible vengeance is a blight upon potatoes! There can be no doubt that this is the fact-a fact so after

the good old times! Nevertheless, for my part, I think it rather hard that Protestant potatoespotatoes that, if they could talk, would cry, "No surrender!"-should suffer equally with potatoes of Roman Catholic principles. I know it's very conceited in me to give an opinion against men like William Ferrie-men who always bawl and scribble (I've heard 'em in their pulpits, as well as read their stuff in print) as if they were nothing less than livery servants to Providence, and knew all the household secrets! And Willy Ferrie, depend on't, is flunky after this fashion.

A rotten potato is a rotten potato-at least so I should have thought it afore I'd been taught better by ranting Willy; but now, I can see into the thing just as well as if Erasmus Wilson-the magician of the microscope—had lent me his glass, and his eyes and brains into the bargain. I can see into the decayed parts, for I won't bother your dear head with hard words (though when a man's got 'em for the first time, he likes to sport 'em), and can behold nothing but what you used to call "the murdering Papishes." I've a 'tato before me, as rotten as the heart of any talking 'tato that ever spouted blarney in the face of starvation. Well, with the microscope, I can see the Old Woman in Scarlet, with her toe polished with holy

X

kisses-cardinals and abbots, and friars and priests, in white and red and gold-and canopies, and dolls of the Virgin, and saints, and little boys swinging censers. I can see all this by the assistance of Willie Ferrie-all of it in one potato-as plainly as once I saw all sorts of sharks in a drop of New River water. I shall write this blessed night to Sir Andrew Agnew (by the way, dear grandmother, it was said that Sir Andrew was lately caught in a Sunday train-but it isn't true: it's now proved to be somebody I won't mention to you, who sometimes, out of spite to the Baronet, goes about in his likeness)-I'll write to Sir Andrew, and get him to give a Potato Lecture, after this fashion, at Exeter Hall. If with one potato he wouldn't make the women cry, then there's no weeping to be got out of an onion! Sir Andrew with one rotten potato, like David with a smooth pebble, would kill Goliath Peel as dead as Tamworth mutton.

And yet when it 's plain that it's the Maynooth Grant, and not the wet-certainly not the wetthat's rotted the potato, we find big-wig doctors sent to Ireland (a further insult to Providence, grandmother) to inquire, as it is presumptuously said, into the cause of the disease. Why, I know what you or any other good old woman would