Well, whatever be the foregoing circumstances, flitting day at last arrives in all its horrors. The lady of the household has for several days been storing all kinds of small things by into drawers and boxes, that they might the more safely be transported, so that the family finds itself already deprived of the half of those things which are necessary to comfort, and the whole of what minister to luxury. Your shaving-box is amissing two mornings before flitting day, and has to be fished up, like a “drowned honour,” from the bottom of some abyss of well-regarded trifles. When you come home to dinner on flitting day eve, it is any money for a boot-jack. You take your meals that evening without table-cloths; and unless you can bring down your proud stomach to a brown kitchen bowl, any thing like a comforting drink is out of the question. The crepuscular anguish of the day is already felt. You go to your bed that night off an uncarpeted floor, and in the midst of all kinds of tubs covered up with packsheet, and looking-glasses swaddled up in linen. If you get a nightcap, you may consider yourself lucky above all mortal men. You go to bed, but sleep there is none, for you have to rise next morning long before the usual hour, and the anticipatory sense of what you have to go through that day fills every nook and cranny of your mind. You awake to a rush of children and servants on the stairs; and though you exert every nerve of your memory to recollect the new geography of things in the room, it is ten to one but you stumble over some tub or chest in the dark, where you thought no tub should be; and, upon the whole, the feeling with which you thrust your poor cold distressed shanks into your vestments, is not much short of that which must possess a man about to walk to the scaffold. A breakfast composed of every thing but the proper materials, and taken out of every thing but the proper vessels, collects such a group of shabby slatternly figures as you did not before think yourself husband, or father, or master to. The meal is gulped in agonies of haste, for the carts were to be at the door at seven exactly, and it is now within a few minutes of the hour. Well, the carts come; one by one are your household goods displaced and packed up on those vehicles. Grates are placed on the breadth of their backs at the bottom, by way of ballast. Then mattresses go over them, to make an agreeable flooring for other things. Tables are tumbled a-top, with their legs reared high in the air, like cart-horses enjoying themselves in their Sunday pastures; and to the ropes with which the heaps are bound down, are attached fry-pans, children’s toys, and other light articles, all by way of garnishing. Though far above such things in general, you are obliged on this occasion to see after very mean details, lest your property should suffer some dreadful damage. The more delicate articles are necessarily entrusted to porters or other serviceable individuals,