Men are a curious study! Sometimes it pays to read to “the end of the volume,” and then again, it don’t--mostly the latter! “MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS;” OR, HOME THE PLACE FOR MARRIED FOLKS Happy Mrs. Emily! Freed from the thraldom of house keeping, and duly installed mistress of a fine suite of rooms at ---- Hotel. No more refractory servants to oversee, no more silver or porcelain to guard, no more cupboards, or closets, or canisters to explore; no more pickles or preserves to make; no more bills of fare to invent,--and over and above all, mistress of a bell-wire which was not “tabooed” on washing and ironing days. Time to lounge on the sofa, and devour “yellow-covered literature;” time to embroider caps, and collars, and chemisettes; time to contemplate the pretty face where housekeeping _might_ have planted “crows feet,” had she not fortunately foreseen the symptoms, and turned her back on dull Care and all his croaking crew. Happy Mrs. Emily! No bird let loose from a cage was ever more joyous; not even her own little children--for she had two of them, and pretty creatures they were too, with their cherry lips, and dimpled limbs, and flaxen ringlets; and very weary they grew, of their gloomy nursery, with its one window, commanding a view of a dingy shed and a tall spectral-looking distilhouse chimney, emitting clouds of smoke and suffocating vapor. Nannie, the nurse, didn’t fancy it, either, so she spent her time in the lobbies and entries, challenging compliments from white-jacketed waiters, while the children peeped curiously into the half-open doors, taking drafts of cold air on their bare necks and shoulders. Sometimes they balanced themselves alarmingly on the spiral ballustrade, gazing down into the dizzy Babel below, inhaling clouds of cigar smoke, and listening, with round-eyed wonder, to strange conversations, which memory’s cud should chew, for riper years to digest. “No children allowed at the _table d’hôte_”--so the “hotel regulations” pompously set forth--the landlord’s tablecloths, gentlemen’s broadcloth, and ladies’ silk dresses being sworn foes to _little Paul Pry fingers_. Poor little exiles! they took their sorrowful meals in the servants’ hall, with their respective nurses, the bill of fare consisting of a rehash of yesterday’s French dishes, (spiced for the digestion of an ostrich.) This was followed by a dessert of stale pastry and ancient raisins, each nurse _at the outset_ propitiating her infant charge with a huge bunch, that she might regale herself with the substantials!--mamma, meanwhile, blissfully ignoring the whole affair, absorbed in the sublime occupation of making German worsted dogs.