into such a mess, that it was with no small trouble I was enabled to help him at all out of it; and at last the tea coming in, put an end to one of the most ludicrous scenes that ever was witnessed. It happened, very luckily, that Mrs. Hunt was a woman of good sterling sense, and a firm mind, accompanied by a very quick penetration, or he would, in his bungling desire to remove, have at least revived, if he had not confirmed, all her former doubts and scruples. On the following evening, with considerable difficulty, I prevailed on the mother, to suffer the clerk of the parish to convey the mortal remains of the little infant in a neat coffin, and deposit it in the church-yard. Instead of partaking in any of the long round of Christmas merry-makings which we had so unpropitiously commenced, we now spent our evenings at home; truly enjoying the greatest of earthly blessings, domestic felicity. How it is possible for those who have once tasted this, the sweetest of all human delights, how it is possible for any rational mind afterwards to submit to be whirled round in the vortex of dissipation, to tolerate, to endure, the empty, vain, comfortless, nothingness of fashionable amusements, now appears to me to be almost inexplicable. The real felicity imparted and received in a happy domestic circle, in one evening, far, very far surpasses all the pleasures derived from the gaze and throng of crowded routs and fashionable parties in a whole year. And yet it is not practicable to convince young minds of this; perhaps it would be improper to attempt it. May we not believe that few persons, if any, can enjoy domestic bliss to its fullest extent, unless they have previously experienced all the wearisomeness, all the unmeaning bustle of the crowded, fashionable, common-place society of routs and balls? Happy, however, are they, if such there be, who have minds so constituted as to enjoy the one, without having been exposed to the previous probation of the other.