tattooing his person, as it were, with a minutely decussated exposure, so that the cold was likely to have struck him as with the teeth of a comb! The secure one has an anxiety peculiar to himself on the subject of easy-chairs, nightgowns, and slippers. The easy-chair must be exact in angle to a single minute of a degree; the nightgown must be properly seen to in respect of fur and flannel; the slippers must every night be placed for him at the proper place; and if Jenny has been so inattentive as to place the left one on the right of the other, he feels himself not a little discomposed. The secure one is most pestilently and piquantly accurate about all things. He loves to arrange, and arrange, and arrange, and over again arrange and settle all the preliminaries and pertinents of any little matter which cannot reasonably be done but one way. If he wishes, for instance, to confer with an upholsterer respecting some alteration in the above easy-chair, he first calls one forenoon, and inflicts an hour’s explanation upon the unhappy man of wood—who is not all a man of wood, otherwise he would, in such a case, be happy. It does not in the least matter at what hour the tradesman should come to see this chair, for the secure one is to be at home the whole day. Yet the very liberty at which he stands produces a difficulty. It would be charity in Providence, by any interference, “to give him not to choose.” “Say eleven; I shall then be quite disengaged—will that hour suit you? Or make it any other hour—say twelve—or say half-past eleven—half-past would do very well.” [He recollects that he seldom gets the whole fiddle-faddle of feeding the canaries over by _half-past_.] “Suppose it were a quarter to twelve; that would answer me better still. I may, perhaps, take a walk out at mid-day; would a quarter to twelve do? Or I might hurry the canaries, and then the half-past might do. I dare say half-past will do best after all; mind half-past eleven,” &c. &c. The man comes, and the business of the chair is entered into. The whole affair is most amply canvassed. The secure one sits down in it, and gives a lecture in a very _ex-cathedra_ style upon all its properties and defects. He complains of the back reclining a little too much back, or the bottom showing too little bottom, or some other fault equally inappreciable; and the upholsterer sees at once that the secure one only complains of this, as he is apt to do of other things, for the very uneasiness arising from its over-easiness. “Lulled on the rack of a too-easy chair.”