"I am glad," he wrote, "to find that in the past year I have at least accomplished more than usual in the way of reading the books which at the beginning of the year I put down to be read. I always do this, and I do not expect to read all I put down, but sometimes I fall much too short of what I proposed, and this year things have been a good deal better. The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live. It is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally quite keen enough, or too keen, about doing that; yet they will not do it in the simplest and most innocent manner by reading. If I live to be eighty, I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications." We have not quite come to that yet, but we are not far off it, and I should fear that the number of even educated people who occupy New Year's Day in laying down a course of serious study for the next twelve months is lamentably small. But Hunting and Health and Books are not the only topics for New Year's meditation. There is also Money, which not seldom obtrudes itself with a disagreeable urgency. We cast our eye over that little parchment-bound volume which only "Fortune's favoured sons, not we" can regard with any complacency; and we observe, not for the first time, that we have been spending a good deal more than we ought to spend, and are not far from the perilous edge of an overdrawn account. This is "animating" indeed, but only as a sudden stab of neuralgia is animating; and we immediately begin to consider methods of relief. But where are our retrenchments to begin? That is always the difficulty. I remember that after the Cattle Plague of 1865, by which he had been a principal sufferer, the first Lord Tollemache was very full of fiscal reforms. "I ought to get rid of half my servants; but they are excellent people, and it would be very wrong to cause them inconvenience. Horses, too--I really have no right to keep a stud. But nothing would ever induce me to sell a horse, and it seems rather heartless to kill old friends. Then, again, about houses--I ought to leave St. James's Square, and take a house in Brompton. But the Brompton houses are so small that they really would not accommodate my family, and it would not be right to turn the boys into lodgings." And so on and so forth, with a magnificent list of contemplated reforms, which went unfulfilled till things had righted themselves and retrenchment was no longer necessary. In the same spirit, though on a very different scale, the inhabitants of Stuccovia contemplate the financial future which lies ahead of New Year's Day. We must economize--that is plain enough. But how are we to begin?