When I wake, my head is clear again. I see my way now to the end of that bit about "the extended field of observation;" and make for my table in high spirits. Just as I sit down, comes another knock at the door. The carriage is ready. The carriage! I had forgotten all about it. There is no way of escape, however. Hours must give way to me, when I am at home; I must give way to hours, when I am at Lady Jinkinson's. My papers are soon shuffled together in my case; and I am once more united with the hospitable party down-stairs. "More bright ideas?" cry the ladies interrogatively, as I take my place in the carriage. "Not the dimmest vestige of one," I answer. Lady Jinkinson shakes her parasol reproachfully at me. "My dear friend, you were always absurdly modest when speaking of yourself; and, do you know, I think it grows on you." We get back in time to dress for dinner. After dinner, there is the social evening, and more Trovatore. After that, cigars with the splendid fellows in the billiard-room. I look over my day's work, with the calmness of despair, when I get to bed at last. It amounts to four sentences and a half; every line of which is perfectly worthless as a literary composition. The next morning, I rise before the rest of the family are up, leave a note of apology on my table, and take the early train for London. This is very ungrateful behaviour to people who have treated me with extreme kindness. But here, again, I must confess the hard truth. The demands of my business in life are imperative; and, sad to say, they absolutely oblige me to dispense with Lady Jinkinson. * * * * * I have now been confessing my misanthropical sentiments at some length; but I have not by any means done yet with the number of my dear friends whom I could dispense with. To say nothing of my friend who borrows money of me (an obvious nuisance), there is my self-satisfied friend, who can talk of nothing but himself, and his successes in life; there is my inattentive friend, who is perpetually asking me irrelevant questions, and who has no power of listening to my answers; there is my accidental friend, whom I always meet when I go out; there is my hospitable friend, who is continually telling me that he wants so much to ask me to dinner, and who never does really ask me by any chance. All these intimate associates of mine are persons of fundamentally irreproachable characters, and of well-defined positions in the world; and yet so unhappily is my nature constituted, that I am not exaggerating when I acknowledge that I could positively dispense with every one of them. To proceed a little farther, now that I have begun to unburden my mind-- * * * * *