“My dear Sir—a thousand pardons.”—“No, indeed Sir, ’twas I—I was the offending party.”—“No, I assure you—I”—eh!—is it?—it is!—my old friend the reader.—Why, my dear friend—you came upon me as if you had been discharged from a Catapult—a Paixhan shot was nothing to you? But where so fast in the fury of the storm—Not to Union Square! Heavens! Man, you will never reach there living—Why in this horrid cold the spirits of Nova-Zembla and Mont-Blanc are dancing in ecstacy about the fountains in the Park, and the very cabs are frozen on their axles! Never think of it. Come—come with me to my rooms hard by in State-street, and on the word of a bachelor and a gentleman, I’ll promise to make you comfortable. Come, take my arm—Whew! how this North-Wester sweeps around the Battery. Here we are—This is the house—A real aristocratic old mansion; is it not?—Enter, my dear friend—Run up the stairs—Holloa! ho! Scip!—Scipio—Africanus—Angel of Darkness—come forth—come forth—Ay! here you are. And you, too, shaggy old Neptune, your eyes sparkling with delight, and your long tongue hanging out over your white teeth—down—you old rascal—down sir—down. Now, is not this snug and comfortable—a good roaring fire of hickory—none of your sullen red-hot anthracite for me. How the cold wind howls through the leafless trees upon the Battery,—Draw the curtains—Scip!—Come, bear a hand, take the reader’s hat and coat. Invest him with the wadded damask dressing gown that Tom sent home from Cairo—and the Turkish slippers—So—so—Now bring me mine; place the well-stuffed easy chairs; roll the round table up between us—bring in the lights. Now, reader, at your elbow, lo! provision for your wants, material and mental—genuine old Farquhar and amber Golden Sherry—the Chateaux I got years since from Lynch; and just opened is that box of genuine Regalias, only smell! “Fabrica de Tabacos—Calle-a-Leon—En la Habana, No. 14.” Is it not Arabia’s perfume! Ha! give me your smoking Spaniard in his sombrero—e’er any a half-naked Bedouin of them all;—or if indeed you do prefer it, there stands the Chiboque coiled up in the corner, and the metaphysical German’s meer-schaum on the shelf. There are biscuit and anchovies, and olives, “old Cheshire,” and other inviting things for your wants physical, and for your mental, lo! uncut and damp from the publishers with the regular new book smell—the North American—Old Blackwood—the Quarterly—the Edinburgh Review—Diedrich in his high back chair, the Sporting and other Maga’s, and by a slight curve of thy vertebræ cervical, behold shining through yon glazed doors—glowing in gold, dross to the gold within; the great master Bard of England—Cervantes—the chosen spirits of Italia and Gaul—Irving—worthy to be called Washington—Bryant—sweet poet—and Halleck, genuine son of the voyagers in the Mayflower—and of literature much other goodly store.