who carry them separately to your new house. “The boys,” glad to escape the school for a day, are employed, to their great satisfaction, in transporting single things, “which don’t break;” and the servants see after certain baskets of crystal and crockery, “which do.” To see all things properly disposed of—each to the individual best fitted for it—is your business, and no easy one it is. At length, after every thing is fairly packed off, the lady and yourself walk away together, the cat following in a pillow-slip under the charge of your second eldest daughter. Before three in the afternoon, the whole of your furniture, broken and whole, has been thrust, higglety-pigglety, into your new house, where you find all things in the most chaotic state of confusion. Kitchen things repose in the dining-room; drawing-room chairs are deposited in the kitchen; and a huge chest of drawers stands in the vestibule, with a shoulder thrust so far out into the _fair way_ as to render it almost impossible to pass. The kitchen grate is only to be built in after six o’clock in the evening, when the masons are released from their day’s work; so there is no possibility of cooking any thing. A _provisional_ arrangement is therefore made on this point. You, and your wife, and your children, and all your assistants, bivouac in some shabby parlour, and regale yourselves (_absit elegantia_) with rolls and porter. Henry, your eldest son, who has wrought like a Turk all day, leads the feast with his coat off, and the scene can only be compared to a rough-and-tumbling in the back woods of America. No ceremony as to knives. Rolls, and even large loaves, are torn through the middle, and large mouthfuls dug out from the mass by the thumb or forefinger. The liquor goes round in some ordinary vessel, never before appropriated to such a purpose, and all feeling of discomfort being stolen away by the novelty and strong natural feeling of the occasion, the jest and laugh abound. Even in the midst of all the disarray, great hopes and expectations are expressed regarding the new mansion. Such capital high ceilings! Such a broad elegant lobby! So different from that dismal hole we have left! Or, if the ceilings are low, and the lobby narrow, while in the former house they were the reverse, the contrast is drawn in reference to some other points where superiority is indisputable, while the demerits of the new abode are cast discreetly into shade, only to be brought out and complained of at the approach of next Candlemas. You either have left a good view from the windows, or you are entering upon one. Suppose your former house, being in the centre of the town, had hardly any view, then your wife thus comments upon it:—“Such a dark confined place! Nothing to be seen from the windows, but the opposite houses, or else the chimney-stalks and _old wives_. Now, here we are quite in the country. The drawing-room commands Fife and North Berwick Law, and even from the bed-rooms we catch a great