We will not dwell here on the domestic operations which are so familiar to all,--the ample provision for good cheer, which has long been making in every man's home who can at any time afford to make good cheer at all. We need not remind our town readers of the increased activity visible in all the interior departments of each establishment, and the apparent extent and complication of its foreign relations; the councils held with the housekeeper and cook; the despatches to the butcher, baker, poulterer, and confectioner, which are their consequence; and the efficient state of preparation which is arising out of all these energetic movements. To our country readers we need not dwell upon the slaughter of fowls in the poultry-yard, and game in the field, or the wholesale doings within doors for the manufacture of pastry of all conceivable kinds and in all its conceivable forms. And to neither the one nor the other is it necessary that we should speak of the packages, in every shape and size, which both are getting ready, for the interchange between friends of the commodities of their respective positions. Here, however, the town has clearly the advantage in point of gain, and the country in point of character,--the former having little besides barrels of oysters and baskets of Billingsgate fish to furnish to the country larders in return for the entire range of the products of the dairy, farmyard, and game-field. But however lightly we may allude to the other articles which enter into the charge of the commissariat department, and have no distinctive character, at this particular season, beyond their unimaginable abundance, we are by no means at liberty, without a more special notice, to pass over the mystery of MINCE-PIE! We speak not here of the _merits_ of that marvellous compound; because a dish which has maintained without impeachment, since long before the days of honest old Tusser (who calls these marvels shred-pies), the same supreme character which it holds amongst the men of these latter days, may very well dispense with our commendation; and every school-boy knows, from his own repeated experience, the utter inadequacy of language to convey any notion of the ineffable flavor of this unapproachable viand. The poverty of speech is never so conspicuous as when even its richest forms are used for the purpose of describing that which is utterly beyond its resources; and we have witnessed most lamentable, although ludicrous, failures, on the part of eloquent but imprudent men, in their ambitious attempts to give expression to their sensations under the immediate influence of this unutterable combination. It is therefore to other properties than those which make their appeal to the palate that we must confine ourselves in our mention of mince-pie.