In this state of desolation and dismay, I called--I could not help it--at the house to which I had so fondly anticipated an invitation, and a welcome. My protest must here however be recorded, that though I called in the hope of being asked, it was my fixed determination not to avail myself of so protracted a piece of politeness. No: my triumph would have been to have annihilated them with an engagement made in September, payable three months after date. With these feelings, I gave an agitated knock--they were stoning the plums, and did not immediately attend. I rung--how unlike a dinner bell it sounded! A girl at length made her appearance, and, with a mouthful of citron, informed me that the family had gone to spend their Christmas Eve in Portland Place. I rushed down the steps, I hardly knew whither. My first impulse was to go to some wharf and inquire what vessels were starting for America. But it was a cold night--I went home and threw myself on my miserable couch. In other words, I went to bed. I dozed and dreamed away the hours till day-break. Sometimes I fancied myself seated in a roaring circle, roasting chestnuts at a blazing log: at others, that I had fallen into the Serpentine while skating, and that the Humane Society were piling upon me a Pelion, or rather a Vesuvius of blankets. I awoke a little refreshed. Alas! it was the twenty-fifth of the month--It was Christmas Day! Let the reader, if he possess the imagination of Milton, conceive my sensations. I swallowed an atom of dry toast--nothing could calm the fever of my soul. I stirred the fire and read Zimmermann alternately. Even reason--the last remedy one has recourse to in such cases--came at length to my relief: I argued myself into a philosophic fit. But, unluckily, just as the Lethean tide within me was at its height, my landlady broke in upon my lethargy, and chased away by a single word all the little sprites and pleasures that were acting as my physicians, and prescribing balm for my wounds. She paid me the usual compliment, and then--"Do you dine at home to-day, sir?" abruptly inquired she. Here was a question. No Spanish inquisitor ever inflicted such complete dismay in so short a sentence. Had she given me a Sphynx to expound, a Gordian tangle to untwist; had she set me a lesson in algebra, or asked me the way to Brobdingnag; had she desired me to show her the North Pole, or the meaning of a melodrama:--any or all of these I might have accomplished. But to request me to define my dinner--to inquire into its latitude--to compel me to fathom that sea of appetite which I now felt rushing through my frame--to ask me to dive into futurity, and become the prophet of pies and preserves!--My heart died within me at the impossibility of a reply.