Note 27 — VILLAGE CHARACTERS.

In connection with the above subject, the author may be permitted to narrate the two following cases which occurred a few years since in the town where he then resided:—The chief actors in the scenes to be described were persons occupying a respectable station in society, and who habitually associated with intelligent and pious people. He and his wife accepted an invitation to dine with a large party. The dinner was laid out in first-rate style, grace was said with becoming solemnity, and we took our seats in due form, when our hostess rose suddenly and rushed out of the room, pale and affrighted, as though the turkey which she was preparing to dismember had suddenly metamorphosed itself into a hobgoblin. We then heard her exclaim, when she found herself alone in the hall, nearly breathless with terror, "O dear, O dear! there are thirteen!" I looked at my wife and she looked at me, in utter amazement, wondering what presage of coming evil could lurk under the number thirteen. At length our good-natured host said to one of his daughters, "Eliza, you must retire, and we will send your plate to you in the other room. You know your Mamma's objection to sit down at the table with such an unlucky number." Eliza quietly withdrew, and then her mother silently entered, almost as pale as a corpse, but her natural colour returned soon after she commenced her carving labours. Thirteen an unlucky number! How odd! I could not make it out, and continued to puzzle my head with it during dinner. However, we were informed, before the party broke up, that one person was sure to die very soon after eating a hearty dinner with twelve, however hale and vigorous they might all be.

The other case is as follows:—A friend of the author had been married, and he and his wife went to pay the customary wedding visit. The sister of the bride was in waiting to receive the company; her mother keeping watch, to see that everything was done in due order. There was a goodly muster of persons, including uncles and aunts, first and second cousins, and friends and acquaintances almost without number. At last the uncle of the bride, a fine portly man, made his appearance, and was in the act of entering the parlour with his hearty congratulations to his niece, when the door was suddenly and rather unceremoniously slammed to by his sister, as though he had been some grim demon, bent on mischief. "Daniel, don't come in; Daniel, you must not come in; Daniel, you shan't come in," exclaimed the lady. "What's the matter now?" said Daniel, who apparently was as much surprised at not being permitted to see us as we were at not being permitted to see him. "What's the matter!" re-echoed his sister; "why, you have got your black coat on!" Daniel was obliged to doff his black coat and put on a blue one, made for a much smaller man, and then he appeared amongst us. Moving nearly as gracefully as a man would do in a strait waistcoat, his appearance was a severe tax on our gravity. The mystery of the black coat rejected, and the blue coat honoured by a presentation, still remained unsolved to my wife and myself, till we overheard a grave matron say, "It was very lucky, as the dear creature wouldn't die now." That is, as was more fully explained afterwards, the black coat would have betokened the death of the bride, if she had seen it. Alas! poor human nature. What a specimen of its absurdity and folly! The black coat of the author was invested with no fatal presage, as he belonged to the clerical order; otherwise, like Uncle Daniel, he must have changed it before he could have tasted a bit of the wedding cake.