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THE RELATION THAT TOOK A LIKING TO ME. 



WERE you, my dear Reader, ever troubled with a deaf aunt? If 

 not, heaven prosper you in the same enviable and happy fortune ! you 

 cannot do better under the sky. But, should you chance to be in the 

 pitiable condition I am, I feel a most brotherly yearning for your so- 

 ciety a desire of trafficking with you in that mutually necessary 

 article consolation. I entertain a most Christian pity for you. I 

 hear your whines and groans escaping at all times like those of a 

 very malefactor. 



You are hoarse with shouting; you have stormed into her 

 " portcullisses of ears" till your eyes are bloodshot and half way out 

 of your head. Your teeth are blown down by blasts of breath from 

 the interior, and your nose is compressed like a negro's, by being 

 squeezed against the sides of her impenetrable head. Are these 

 things not so ? Is not this your actual condition ? Then, depend 

 upon it, you never had a thorough .nut-deaf aunt in the whole course 

 of your existence. 



He was a cunning flunkie who first served his time at the back of 

 experience, and found out that she taught her servants wisdom. I 

 never could find out the true value of ears, till I had learned by ex- 

 perience what it was to lack them. Not that my aunt Judith had 

 been deprived of these organs oh, no ; she had a pair, but unluckily, 

 like the blank windows in a mansion, they served only for show 

 very handsome and elaborate outside, but stopped up with bricks and 

 mortar. Nothing short of a pair of forge-bellows could drive a breath 

 of air through them. 



I remember the time when at my own home, and free to range 

 field and forest for sport from one year's end to another, I had a plea- 

 sant soul, and was altogether one of those easy-minded, dough-like 

 sort of lads, who care not a toss what shape they are, providing every 

 thing else be agreeable, who are always high-spirited, can be easily 

 amused at less than nothing, and who, according to Cocker of Strat- 

 ford-on-Avon, " will evermore peep through their eyes, and laugh 

 like parrots at a bagpiper." But after those merciless old folks, my 

 parents, had turned me over for a year's scriousizing with my aunt 

 Judith, I soon came to have such a leaden, sedate, and " vinegar as- 

 pect," as led visitors to think I was (as the Scotch say) " her own 

 veritable chiel." 



Before my year with her was out, a most disastrous misfortune 

 befel me, for I unluckily discovered that somehow or other the old lady 

 had taken a liking to me ! My nervous sensibility was shocked 

 what in the world would become of me ? I could not talk to her ; 

 she was stone-deaf. My mind at best never rested above five mi- 

 nutes, for I was always obliged to storm at such a rate, that any per- 

 son overhearing our most peaceable conversation, would absolutely 

 imagine we were going raging mad, tearing one another to tatters, to 

 very rags ; for, by a strange fatality, she always shouted as loud as 

 those were compelled to do who addressed her. I could not be 



