Lectured up to removing point, you consent, unhappy man! to leave your shop some forenoon, in order to take a walk with your wife about the outskirts of the town, in search of a more airy, more spacious, and more genteel abode. You are dragged “by the lug and the horn,” as shepherds say, through multitudes of those “delightful small _self-contained_ houses,” which offer, “within twenty minutes’ walk of the college,” all the elegancies of Heriot Row and Great King Street, at a tithe of the rent. You find them all as like each other in the interior as if they had been made on the principle of chip-boxes; but yet, to your wife, each seems to have its own peculiar merits. One excels in the matter of a lobby; another has an extra closet; a third affords a superior view from the drawing-room windows; and a fourth—O merit above all merits!—transcends its fellows in the article of a back-green. Every thing, however, is inspected—every thing is taken into the general account; and the result of the whole is, that though the rent is ten pounds higher, and the dining-room a thought less than in your present abode, you _must_ remove. The carpets, with a very little eeking and clipping, will all suit. Your sideboard, of which your spouse has a measure in her reticule, will exactly answer the recess devoted to it. The jack in the kitchen answers to a tee; and even the scraper at the door has something about it that is singularly appropriate, as if the builder at the very first had designed to take the measure of your foot. All things appear, in the showing of your good dame, to be so remarkably answerable and proper, that you half believe it to be a matter of destiny, and, in completing your arrangements, hardly bargain so much with the landlord as with Fate.