slimness of their youth. With what patient ingenuity did the good dames of Miss Mitford's village, aided occasionally by an itinerant tailoress, turn and return their husbands' cast-off clothing, until, from seeming ruin, they had evolved sound garments for their growing boys; and with what pardonable pride did the strutting youngsters exhibit on the village streets these baggy specimens of their mothers' skill! Among the innumerable anecdotes told of George III., it is said that, strolling once with Queen Charlotte in the woods of Windsor, he met a little red-cheeked, white-haired lad, who proved, on examination, to be the son of one of his majesty's beef-eaters. The gracious king, always well pleased with children, patted the boy's flaxen head, and bade him kneel and kiss the queen's hand, but this the sturdy young Briton declined flatly to do; not, be it said, from any desire to emulate the examples of Penn and Franklin, by illustrating on a minor scale the heroic principles of democracy, but solely and entirely that he might not spoil his new breeches by contact with the grass. So thrifty a monarch, says Thackeray, should have hugged on the spot a child after his own heart; and
