I remember laughing heartily, as I doubt not you did also, dear reader, if you saw it, at a cut which appeared several years ago in the Punch department of "Harper's Magazine." A "wee toddler," perhaps four years old, with a most lack-a-daisical expression upon her chubby visage, accosts her grandmother after this fashion: "I am tired of life, grandmamma! The world is hollow, and my doll is stuffed with sawdust, and if you please, ma'am, I should like to go to a nunnery!" Yet, that there are natures upon which the feeling of emptiness and longing herein burlesqued seizes in mere babyhood is sadly true. And what wonder? From their cradles, hundreds of children, in our so-called better classes, are fed upon husks. A superficial education, in which all that is not showy accomplishment is so dry and uninviting that the student has little disposition to seek further for the rich kernel, the strong meat of knowledge, is the preparatory course to a premature introduction into the world, to many the only phase of life they are permitted to see, a scene where all is flash and froth, empty bubbles of prizes, chased by men and women with empty heads, and oh, how often empty, aching hearts! Outside principles, outside affections, outside smiles, and most pitiable of all, outside piety! Penury of heart and stomach at home; abroad a parade of reckless extravagance and ostentatious profession of fine feeling and liberal sentiments! "Woe," cried the preacher, "to them that make haste to be rich!" If he had lived in our day, in what biting terms of reprobation and contempt would he have declaimed against the insane ambition of those who forego the solid comforts of judicious expenditure of a moderate income would afford; spurn the holy quiet of domestic joys--neglect soul with heart culture--in their haste to seem rich, when Providence has seen that wealth is not to be desired for them! Out upon the disgusting, indecent race and scramble! The worship of the golden calf is bad enough, but when this bestial idolatry rises to such a pitch of fanaticism, that in thousands of households copies in pinchbeck and plated-ware are set up and served, the spectacle is too monstrous in its abomination! This it is that crowds our counting-rooms with bankrupts and our state-prisons with defaulters; that is fast turning our ball-rooms and other places of fashionable rendezvous into vile caricatures of foreign courts, foreign manners, and foreign vices; while the people we ape--our chosen models and exemplars--hold their side in inextinguishable laughter at the grave absurdity of our laborious imitation. It is no cause for marvel that, in just retribution, there should be sent a panic-earthquake, every three years, to shake men to their senses.