To the Spendthrift, or even to the more modest practitioner who merely lives up to his income, the New Year, as we have seen, offers few opportunities for resolutions of reform; but I fancy that the Skinflint, and his cousin the Screw, find it full of suggestive possibilities. I remember a gentleman of "griping and penurious tendencies" (the phrase is Mr. Gladstone's) telling me when I was a schoolboy that he had resolved to spend nothing with his tailor in the year then dawning. He announced it with the air befitting a great self-surrender, but I thought, as I looked at his clothes, that he was really only continuing the well-established practice of a lifetime. The Screw, of course, is of no one place or age; and here is an excellent citation from the Diary of a Screw--Mr. Thomas Turner--who flourished in Sussex in the eighteenth century: "This being New Year's Day, myself and wife at church in the morning. Collection. My wife gave 6d. But, they not asking me, I gave nothing. Oh! may we increase in faith and good works, and maintain the good intentions we have this day taken up." Those who have tried it say that hoarding is the purest of human pleasures; and I dare say that by the end of the year good Mr. Turner's banking-book was a phantom of delight. All these reflections, and others like unto them, came whirling on my mind this New Year's Eve; and, just as I was beginning to reduce them to form and figure, the shrill ting-ting of the church-bell pierced the silence of the night. _Watch-Night._ Those who are not the friends of the English Church denounce her as hidebound, immovable, and unreceptive. Here is the--or an--answer to the charge. She has borrowed, originally, from the Swedenborgians and more immediately from the Wesleyans, a religious observance which, though unrecognized in Prayer-book or Kalendar, now divides with the Harvest Festival the honour of being the most popular service in the Church of England.