In the first place, then, you who walk are painfully aware that a sore foot is almost a calamity, if it befall you whilst _en route_. Remedy there is none; be thankful that there is an infallible preventive, of whose unfailing excellence I can speak with unreserved commendation. On its simple merits I once averaged in Switzerland twenty-five miles a day, for thirty successive days; and this without gall or blister. Fool that I was, to neglect it, two or three weeks ago. Nothing is easier. Ere you start in the morning, soap or grease the naked foot thoroughly, and then draw the stocking over it. Wash off, with a dash of brandy in the water, on finishing your day's work. The play of the foot is the preservative against abrasion--a certain one, I assure you. In the second place, if--passing your life amid prairies or savannahs--you are sometimes puzzled to comprehend allusions to buttresses, shoulders, ridges, peaks, cones, ravines, and the various terms in use among enthusiastic mountaineers, I think I can put you on a very simple explanatory track. Next time you lie in bed, with a few spare moments for reflection upon this grave topic, just turn on to your back and elevate one knee or both knees. The coverlid or sheet will immediately assume--I am serious in saying--a curiously correct semblance, I might almost term it a model in relief, of the face of any mountainous country. Laugh not, but try it. A slight movement on your part varies the form and outline and relative bearing of hill and vale, raises a pinnacle here, or there sinks a gorge precipitously steep. If I had the misfortune to be confined to bed by sickness--excluding gout, which might render the process impossible--I could thus, with the aid of a map and some tables of distances, design a passable fac-simile of the leading White Mountains themselves. Why Yankee ingenuity should not long ago have manufactured _papier-maché_ plans thereof, in relief, altogether passes my comprehension. They would sell well as souvenirs of travel. SLIDING SCALE OF THE INCONSOLABLES. _From the French._ How rapid is the progress of oblivion, with respect to those who are no more! How many a quadrille shall we see, this winter, exclusively made up from the ranks of inconsolable widows! Widows of this order exist only in the literature of the tombstone. In the world, and after the lapse of a certain period, there is but one sort of widows inconsolable--those who refuse to be comforted, because they can't get married again! One of our most distinguished sculptors was summoned, a short time since, to the house of a young lady, connected by birth with a family of the highest grade in the aristocracy of wealth, and united in marriage to the heir of a title illustrious in the military annals of the Empire.