pitying gentleness, we silently attended the Old Year across the ghostly threshold of midnight, and my father at last rose reverently from his chair to open the window, through which, at that breath, the first peals would float with new promise and remembering toll. We children were expected to come into the presence of the grown people and enjoy the interesting guests whom we all loved. My father was skillful in choosing friends: they were rare, good men, and he and they really met; their loves and interests and his were stirred by the intercourse, as if unused muscles had been stretched. I could perceive that my father and his best cronies glowed with refreshment. Mr. Bennoch was a great favorite with us. He was short and fat, witty and jovial. He was so different in style and finish from the tall, pale, spiritual Henry Bright (whom my mother speaks of as "shining like a star" during an inspiring sermon) that I almost went to sleep in the unending effort to understand why God made so sharp a variety in types. Mr. Bennoch wrote more poetry than Mr. Bright did, even, and he took delight in breathing the same air with writers. But he himself had no capacity more perfected than that of chuckling like a whole brood of chickens at his own jokes as well as those of others. The point of his joke might be obscure to us, but the chuckle never failed to satisfy. He was a source of entire rest to the dark-browed, deep-eyed thinker who smiled before him. The only anecdote of Mr. Bennoch which I remember is of a Scotchman who, at an inn, was wandering disconsolately about the parlor while his dinner was being prepared. A distinguished traveler--Dickens, I think--was dashing off a letter at the centre-table, describing the weather and some of the odd fellows he had observed in his travels. "And," he wrote, "there is in the room at the present moment a long, lank, red-headed, empty-brained nincompoop, who looks as if he had not eaten a square meal for a month, and is stamping about for his dinner. Now he approaches me as I sit writing, and I hear his step pause behind my chair. The fool is actually looking over my shoulder, and reading these words"--A torrent of Scotch burst forth right here: "It's a lee, sir,--it's a lee! I never read a worrd that yer wrort!" Screams from us; while Mr. Bennoch's sudden aspect of dramatic rage was as suddenly dropped, and he blazed once more with broad smiles, chuckling. I will insert here a letter written by this dear friend in 1861:-- 80 WOOD STREET, LONDON.