Breakfast over, you begin to consider how you shall fill up the dreary vacuum which still yawns between you and dinner. Of course you cannot shoot, unless you are inclined to take a day at the ducks and geese, which would be rather an expensive amusement. You covet a ride, and propose a scamper across the country. Our dear sir, it is as much as your life is worth! What with canals and viaducts, and railways and hedgerows, you could not get over a mile without either being plunged into water, or knocked down by tow ropes, or run into by locomotives, or pitched from embankments, or impaled alive, or slain by a stroke of electricity from some telegraphic conductor! Recollect that we are not now living in the days of steeple-chasing. Then as to horses, are you not aware that our host keeps only two--and fine sleek, sturdy Flanders brutes they are--for the purpose of conveying Mrs Bobbins and her progeny to the meeting-house? There is no earthly occasion for any more expensive stud. The railway station is just a quarter of a mile from the door, and Eclipse himself could never match our new locomotives for speed. But you may have a drive if you please, and welcome. Where shall we go to? There used to be a fine waterfall at an easy distance, with rocks, and turf, and wildflowers, and all that sort of thing; and though the season is a little advanced, we might still make shift under the hazels and the hollies; could we not invite the ladies to accompany us, and extemporise a pic-nic? Our excellent friend! that waterfall exists no longer. It was a mere useless waste; has been blown up with gun-cotton; and the glen below it turned into a reservoir for the supply of a manufacturing town. The hazels are all down, and the hollies pounded into birdlime. And that fine old baronial residence, where there were such exquisite Claudes and Ruysdaels? Oh! that estate was bought by Mr Smalt the eminent dyer, from the trustees of the late Lord--the old mansion has been pulled down, a cottage _ornée_ built in its place, and the pictures were long ago transferred to the National Gallery. And is there nothing at all worth seeing in the county? Oh yes! There is Tweel's new process for making silk out of sow's ears, and Bottomson's clothing mills, where you see raw wool put into one end of the machinery, and issue from the other in the shape of ready-made breeches. Then a Socialist lecture on the sin and consequences of matrimony will be delivered in the market-town at two o'clock precisely, by Miss Lewdlaw--quite a lady, I assure you--whom you will afterwards meet at dinner. Or you may, if you please, attend the meeting of the Society for the Propagation of a Natural Religion, at which the Rev. Mr Scampson will preside; or you may go down to the factories, or any where else you please, except the village, for there is a great deal of typhus fever in it, and we are a little apprehensive for the children! You decline these tempting offers, and resolve to