All this, the reader will admit, is very strange and very French. In the same work, Careme chronicles the names of all the celebrated cooks who perished in the retreat from Russia. This prince of the kitchen died in 1833, when he was scarcely fifty years of age. His works are still well known in France, and some of them have passed through more than one edition. It is an odd contradiction, that the name of this prince of the kitchen should be the French word for the time of fasting. Careme means _Lent_. WONDERFUL WALKER. I have here a good story for hard times. It is of a clergyman and cotton spinner of the Church of England, who, upon an income of twenty-four pounds a year, lived very comfortably to the age of ninety-four years, reared a family of eight children respectably, gave two of his sons a University education, and left an estate worth two thousand pounds. Every one will admit that this was a good deal to do upon a salary of one hundred and twenty dollars; and some readers, who find the winter hard to get through, may be interested to know how he did it. To this day, though he has been dead one hundred years, he is spoken of in the region where he lived, as Wonderful Walker. By this epithet, also, he is spoken of by the poet Wordsworth, in the "Excursion:"-- "And him, the Wonderful, Our simple shepherds, speaking from the heart, Deservedly have styled." He lived and died in the lake country of England, near the residence of Wordsworth, who has embalmed him in verse, and described him in prose. Robert Walker, the youngest of twelve children, the son of a yeoman of small estate, was bred a scholar because he was of a frame too delicate, as his father thought, to earn his livelihood by bodily labor. He struggled into a competent knowledge of the classics and divinity, gained in strength as he advanced towards manhood, and by the time he was ordained was as vigorous and alert as most men of his age. After his ordination, he had his choice of two curacies of the same revenue, namely, five pounds a year--twenty-five dollars. One of these, Seathwaite by name, too insignificant a place to figure upon a map, or even in the "Gazetteer," was situated in his native valley, in the church of which he had gone to school in his childhood. He chose Seathwaite, but not for that reason. He was in love; he wished to marry; and this parish had a small parsonage attached to it, with a garden of three quarters of an acre. The person to whom he was engaged was a comely and intelligent domestic servant such as then could frequently be found in the sequestered parts of England. She had saved, it appears, from her wages the handsome sum of forty pounds. Thus provided, he married, and entered upon his curacy in his twenty-sixth year, and set up housekeeping in his little parsonage.