What is it to go away on a visit? Well, it is to take leave of the little velvet rocking-chair, which adjusts itself so nicely to your shoulders and spinal column; to cram, jam, squeeze, and otherwise compress your personal effects into an infinitessimal compass; to be shook, jolted, and tossed, by turns, in carriage, railroad and steamboat; to be deafened with the stentorian lungs of cab-drivers, draymen and porters; to clutch your baggage as if every face you saw was a highwayman; (or to find yourself transported with rage, at finding _it_ transported by steam to Greenland or Cape Horn.) It is to reach your friend’s house, travel-stained, cold and weary, with an unbecoming crook in your bonnet; to be utterly unable to get the frost out of your tongue, or “_the beam into your eye_,” and to have the felicity of hearing some strange guest remark to your friend, as you say an early good-night, “Is it possible THAT is your friend, Miss Grey?” It is to be ushered into the “best chamber,” (always a _north_ one) of a cold January night; to unhook your dress with stiffened digits; to find every thing in your trunk _but_ your night-cap; to creep between polished _linen_ sheets, on a congealed _mattress_, and listen to the chattering of your own teeth until daylight. It is to talk at a mark twelve hours on the stretch; to eat and drink all sorts of things which disagree with you; to get up sham fits of enthusiasm at trifles; to learn to yawn circumspectly behind your finger-tips; to avoid all allusion to topics unsuited to your pro tem. latitude; to have somebody forever at your nervous elbow, _trying to make you_ “_enjoy yourself_;” to laugh when you want to cry; to be loquacious when you had rather be taciturn; to have mind and body in unyielding harness, for lingering, consecutive weeks; and then to invite your friends, with a hypocritical smile, to play the same farce over with you, “whenever business or pleasure calls them” to Frog town! HELEN HAVEN’S “HAPPY NEW YEAR.”