spend the morning in the house. Is there a billiard room? How can you possibly suppose it? Time, sir, is money; and money is not to be made by knocking about ivory balls. But there is the library if you should like to study, and plenty material within it. Delighted at the prospect of passing some congenial though solitary hours, you enter the apartment, and, disregarding the models upon the table, which are intended to elucidate the silk and sow's-ear process, you ransack the book-shelves for some of your ancient favourites. But in vain you will search either for Shakspeare or Scott, Milton or Fielding, Jeremy Taylor or Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine: all these are proscribed antiquities. Instead of these you will find Essays by Hampden, junior, and Ethics by Thistlewood, senior, Paine's Age of Reason, Jeremy Bentham's Treatises, Infanticide Vindicated, by Herod Virginius Cackell, Esq., Member of the Literary Institute of Owenstown, Cobden's Speeches, Wheal's Exposition of the Billy-roller, Grubb's Practical Deist, Welford's Influences of the Game Laws, and much more such profitable reading. What would you not give for a volume by Willison Glass! Disgusted with this literary miscellany, you chuck the Practical Deist into the fire, and walk up-stairs to rejoin the ladies. You find them in the drawing-room hard at work upon cross-stitch and pincushions for the great Bazar which is shortly to be opened under the auspices of the Anti-Christian League, and you feel for a moment like an intruder. But Emily Bobbins, a nice girl, who will have thirty thousand pounds when her venerated sire is conveyed to the Mausoleum of the Bobbinses, and who has at this present moment a very pretty face, trips up and asks you for a contribution to her yearly album. Yearly?--the phrase is an odd one, and you crave explanation. The blooming virgin informs you that she edits an annual volume, popular in certain circles, for the Society for the Abolition of all Criminal Punishment, she being a corresponding Member; and she presents you with last year's compilation. You open the work, and find some literary _bijouterie_ by the disciples of the earnest school, poems on the go-a-head principle, and tales under such captivating titles as the Virtuous Poacher, Theresa, or the Heroine of the Workhouse, and Walter Truck, an Easy Way with the Mechanic. There are also sundry political fragments by the deep-thinkers of the age, from which you discover that Regicide is the simplest cure for "Flunkeyism, Baseness, and Unveracity," and that the soundest philosophers of the world are two gentlemen, rejoicing in the exotic names of Sauerteig and Teufelsdröckh. You, being a believer in the Book of Common Prayer, decline to add your contribution to the Miscellany, and make the best of your way from the house for a stroll upon the public highway. For some hours you meander through the mud, between rows of stiff hedges; not a stage-coach, nor even a buggy is to be seen.