Still, however, this is a world of violent contrasts, and of painful incongruities. Some of us may laugh; but while we laugh, let us be assured of it that there are others who are weeping. It is pleasant all about you here, within your brief horizon, but the distance may be short to scenes most sadly different. Smiles are on your brow, as you jostle through the street, yet your elbow touches him whose heart is torn with grief. Is there a merry-making in your family—are friends in congregation there with mirth, and dance and song? How strange to think that it is scarce a step to the couch of suffering or the chamber of despair! The air is tremulous perchance with sighs and groans; and though our joyous strains overwhelm all sorrow’s breathings, yet the sorrow still exists even when we hear it not. And so it was on this autumnal morning. While the very air had delight in it, and while happiness pervaded the atmosphere, there was a little man who felt it not—poor little man—poor grim little man—poor queer little man—poor little man disconsolate. Sadness had engrossed the little man. For him, with no sunshine in his heart, all outward sunshine was in vain. It had no ray to dispel the thick fogs of gloom that clouded round his soul; and the gamesome breezes which fluttered his garments and played around his countenance, as if to provoke a smiling recognition, met with as little of response as if they had paid courtship to the floating iceberg, and they passed quickly by, chilled by the hyperborean contact. The mysterious little man—contradictory in all his aspects to the order of the day—appeared as he walked toward the corner of Fifth and Chestnut streets—justice’s peculiar stand, where “Black Marias” most do congregate, and where his Honor does the honors to that portion of society who are so unfortunate and so maladroit as to be caught in their transgressions and to be arrested in their sins—he appeared, we say, as he approached this awful corner, to be most assuredly under duresse, as well as an enlistment under general affliction—a guard of functionaries—a body-guard, though not of honor, seemed to wait upon him—the grim little man and the queer little man. There was a hand too—ponderous in weight—austere in knuckle—severe in fist—resting clutchingly upon the collar of the little man, as if to demonstrate the fact that he only was the person to be gazed at—the incident, the feature, the sensation of the time—though the little man resisted not. He had yielded to his fate, sulkily, it may be, but submissively. Pale was the little man’s face—most pale; while his hat was generally crumpled in its circumference, and particularly smashed in the details of its crown, having the look, abused hat, of being typical of its owner’s fortunes—an emblem, as it were, of the ups and the downs, the stumbling-places and the pitfalls wherewith its owner’s way through life is diversified. He had a coat, too—though this simple fact