No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them--when the mountain must go to Mahomet-- Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth. It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible; some feature, upon which no smile could play; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a distillation. There they lay; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, which you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened. The craving Dragon--_the Public_--like him in Bel's temple--must be fed; it expected its daily rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him. MISS PATE [Sidenote: _M.M. Betham_] A Miss Pate (when he heard of her, he asked if she was any relation to Mr. John _Head_, of Ipswich) was at a party, and he said, on hearing her name, "Miss Pate I hate." "You are the first person who ever told me so, however," said she. "Oh! I mean nothing by it. If it had been Miss Dove, I should have said, Miss Dove I love, or Miss Pike I like." ... Another, who was very much marked with the small-pox, looked as if the devil had ridden roughshod over her face. I saw him talking to her afterwards with great apparent interest, and noticed it, saying, "I thought he had not liked her." His reply was, "I like her internals very well." THE LOST ORNAMENT [Sidenote: _Washington Allston_] Lamb was present when a naval officer was giving an account of an action which he had been in, and, to illustrate the carelessness and disregard of life at such times, said that a sailor had both his legs shot off, and as his shipmates were carrying him below, another shot came and took off his arms; they, thinking he was pretty much used up, though life was still in him, threw him out of a port. "Shame, d----d shame," stuttered our Lamb, "he m-m-might have l-lived to have been an a-a-ornament to Society!" YOUR HAT, SIR [Sidenote: _Crabb Robinson_]