in pausing to view and listen to what is going on in all the houses where one has an interest. By means of that inimitable telescope we carry about in us, (which acts as well in the pitch-dark night as at noon, and defies distance and house-walls,) I see in turn a Christmas tree, with its tapers glittering in a room full of young eyes, or the games and the dance, or the cozy little party of elderly folk round the fire or the tea-table; and I hear, not the actual jokes, but the laughter, and “the sough of words without the sense,” and can catch at least the soul of the merriment. If I am at ease, I am verily among them: if not, I am thankful not to be there; and, at all events have, from life-long association, caught so much of the contagious spirit of sociability, that, when midnight comes, I lie down with an impression of its having been an extraordinary day,--a social one, though, (as these are the days when one is sure _not_ to see one’s doctor,) the face of my maid is, in reality, the only one that has met my eyes. O yes! on these marked days, however it may be on ordinary ones, our friends may take our word for it that we are most cheery alone. There is one day of the year of which everybody will believe this,--one’s birthday. Regarded as a birthday usually and naturally is, in ordinary circumstances, there must be something melancholy in it when attempted to be kept in the sick-room of a permanent invalid: but this melancholy is lost when one is alone. It is true, one’s mind goes back to the festivals of the day in one’s childhood, and to the mantling feelings of one’s youth, when each birthday brought us a step further into the world which lay in its gay charms all before us; and we find the gray hairs and thin hands of to-day form an ugly contrast with the images conjured up. But, in another view,--a view which can be enjoyed only in silence and alone,--what a sanctity belongs to these gray hairs and other tokens of decay! They and the day are each tokens (how dear!) seals (how distinct!) of promise of our selection for a not distant admittance to a station whence we may review life and the world to better advantage than even now. If, with every year of contemplation, the world appears a more astonishing fact, and life a more noble mystery, we cannot but be reanimated by the recurrence of every birthday which draws us up higher into the region of contemplation, and nearer to the gate within which lies the disclosure of all mysteries which worthily occupy us now, and doubtless a new series of others adapted to our then ennobled powers. This is a birthday experience which it requires leisure and solitude fully to appropriate: and it yet leaves liberty for the human sympathies which belong to the season. Post time is looked to for its sure freight of love and pity and good wishes from a few--or not a few--whose affections keep them even more on the watch than ourselves for one’s own holy day. Letters are one’s best company on