Now, Scip! Lord of the Gold Coast—throw more wood upon the fire—Ay! that will do—my good old faithful servant—that will do—now take that pepper and salt head of thine down to the kitchen hearth, there to retail thy legend and goblin story, or ensconce thee in the corner at thy will—Ah! hah, old Neptune—snug in thy place upon the hearth rug—thy nose lying between thy outstretched paws as thou lookest intently in the fire—Bless thine honest heart!—thinking, I warrant me, of the beautiful child whom thou didst leap the Battery bridge to save. How bravely thou didst bear the little sufferer up on the fast rushing tide. The grateful father would have bought thee for thy weight in gold, as thou didst lie panting and half exhausted—but look not so wistfully my dog—a sack of diamonds could not purchase thee—no—never do we part till death steps in between us—and, by my faith, an’ thou goest first, thou shalt have Christian burial. Now, dear reader, as thou reclinest comfortably in that big arm chair, thy feet in Ottoman slippers resting on the fender, the blue smoke of thy cigar wreathing and curling around thy nose, as it ascends in placid clouds, and floats in misty wreaths above thy forehead—the glass of Chateaux, like a ruby resting upon its slender stem, light, quivering at thy elbow, and that open Blackwood upon thy knee—dost not—confess it—dost not feel more kind and charitable, than if, with benumbed fingers, thou wert following a frozen visage to thy distant mansion, in the great city’s far purlieus— But, heaven guard us! how savagely the tempest roars and howls around the chimney tops—Good angels preserve the poor mariner as he ascends the ice-clad rigging—lays out upon the slippery yard—and handles with frost-benumbed fingers the rigid canvass folds. Ah! I recollect it was in just such a night as this, a few years since—years that have rolled past into retrograde eternity, that I was seated in that same arm chair, in the same bachelor independence, the fire burning just as brightly—the curtains as snugly drawn—my beautiful Flora looking down with the same sweetness from her frame above the mantel—my snow white Venus between the piers—the Gladiator stretching forth his arm in just such proud defiance from his pedestal—my Rembrandt—Claude—and Rubens flickering in softness in the firelight—the Fornarina and St. Cecilia with vase of incense clasped, and upturned eyes of deep devotion, hanging in the same placid stillness between their silken tassels, and that Æolian harp chiming just such wild and fitful strains—’twas in just such a cold and inhospitable night, that, sitting with my legs extended upon the fender, I fell into a train of rather melancholy musings.