the hat along with it.” And the secure one, without any premeditated hard-heartedness, thinks nothing of making such an incident apologize to himself for an habitual shutting of his door and his heart against the poor for the next twelvemonth. There is never any imperfection in the _externe_ of the secure one. He bears about him a certain integrality of look that fills and satisfies the eye. From his good well-brushed waterproof beaver, all along down by his roomy blue coat, drab well-fledged, amply-trousered limbs, and so down to his _double_ shoes, not omitting such points as his voluminous white neckcloth without collar, his large Cairngorm brooch, which looks as if a dish of jelly had been inverted into his bosom, and his heavy, pursy bunch of seals dangling, clearly defined and well relieved, from the precipice of belly—every thing betokens the secure one. Clothes are not so much clothes with him as they are a kind of defensive armour! The truth is, the secure one lives in a state of constant warfare with the skiey influences. The chief campaign is in winter. Instead of entering the field, like Captain Bobadil, about the tenth of March, he opens the trenches towards the twenty-fourth of October. He then invests himself with a cuirass of wool almost thick enough to obstruct the passage of a cannon-ball. For months after, he remains in arms, prepared to stand out against the most violent attacks of the enemy, and, in reality, there is hardly any advantage to be got of the secure one by fair open storms or frosts. He bears a charmed life against all such candid modes of warfare. He cannot be overthrown in a pitched battle. It is only ambuscade draughts through open windows, and other kinds of bush-fighting, that ever are of any effect against him. Like Hector in the armour of Patroclus, he is invulnerable over almost all his whole person; but an arrowy rheumatism, like the spear of Achilles, will sometimes reach him through a very small chink. Like the mighty Achilles himself, he is literally proof, perhaps, against every thing but what assails him through the very lowest part of his person—he can stand every thing but wet feet. There is an instance on record of his having once been laid by the heels for three months, in consequence of sitting one night in the pit of the Theatre with a slightly damp umbrella between his knees. He was just about to get entirely better of this disorder, when all at once he was thrown back for six weeks more, by reason, as he himself related, of his having changed the wear (in his sick-chamber) of a silk watch-riband for a chain! “All from the imprudence of that rash girl Jenny, who thought the riband a little shabby, and put on the chain instead. Why, Sir! a thick double riband, more than an inch broad; only conceive what a material addition it must have been to my ordinary clothing!” The chain, he might have added, was apt to be worse than nothing, for it was of irregular application,