colds; and you will remember how much good a spoonful or two did little George last February, when we thought he was going to take the fever; indeed, the doctor said it had been the very saving of his life.” Nothing, of course, can withstand an appeal to such authority; so the money is disbursed for the purchase of the fruit and other materials, although the goodman never can exactly see now some pounds’ worth of jelly should be laid up in store, all for the sake of needing two tea-spoonfuls. Sometimes the family is so unfortunate as to get an oven, and a particularly economical Miss undertakes to bake what is called family bread. A great saving is expected from this source; but it soon turns out that so much of the article is given away to friends, as a kind of curiosity, or to impress them with a sense of the economy practised in the house, that a great deal more is lost than gained by the novelty. In fact, it always turns out, as in the case of the Vicar of Wakefield and his thrice notable spouse, that these chronic economists are not observed to make their husbands any richer by their contrivances, so much is lost by the expense of the experiment, compared with what is gained by the short duration of the practice. SUSAN HAMILTON, A TALE OF VILLAGE LIFE. The village of Daldaff lay in a nook of the hills, in one of the most rural districts of Scotland. Far from any of the great thoroughfares, or any of the large manufacturing towns, it continued, down even to the beginning of the present century, to be one of the most entire specimens in existence of all that a Scotch village used to be. Its situation was a deep hollow, upon the banks of a mountain stream, and it looked from some points of view as if a parcel of children’s toy-houses had been shaken promiscuously in a bowl, and suddenly fixed in the way they happened to arrange themselves at the bottom. It was all a confused mixture of gray old walls and brown thatch, with green gardens, and arbours, and mountain-ash trees. When you looked down from any of the surrounding heights, you wondered how communication was carried on amongst neighbours, or how strangers found an entrance into the village; for you saw no trace of streets, paths, or ways. It was only when you descended into the place, that you saw here and there a narrow road threading its way among the houses, somewhat after the manner of the puzzle called the walls of Troy. Most of the little dwellings had a long stripe of garden, running from behind them up the hill; other houses had their sides or backs placed close against the bank, so that you might have walked off the ground upon their roofs without perceiving it—while the gardens spread downwards before them, like aprons. These gardens bore large beds of refulgent cabbages, with gooseberry bushes between; and always in some sunny and sheltered place there were a few bee-hives, the tops of which were kept warm either with a crown of straw or a mantle of turf.