It is awkward just now to go and beg pot-luck from such a family as this; because, though a guest is always welcome, we are thirteen at table--an unlucky number, it is said. This evil is only temporary, and will be remedied presently, when the family will be thirteen WITHOUT the occasional guest, to judge from all appearances. Early in the morning Mrs. Fairfax rises, and cuts bread and butter from six o'clock till eight; during which time the nursery operations upon the nine little graces are going on. If his wife has to rise early to cut the bread and butter, I warrant Fairfax must be up betimes to earn it. He is a clerk in a Government office; to which duty he trudges daily, refusing even twopenny omnibuses. Every time he goes to the shoemaker's he has to order eleven pairs of shoes, and so can't afford to spare his own. He teaches the children Latin every morning, and is already thinking when Tom shall be inducted into that language. He works in his garden for an hour before breakfast. His work over by three o'clock, he tramps home at four, and exchanges his dapper coat for his dressing-gown--a ragged but honorable garment. Which is the best, his old coat or Sir John's bran-new one? Which is the most comfortable and becoming, Mrs. Fairfax's black velvet gown (which she has worn at the Pocklington Square parties these twelve years, and in which I protest she looks like a queen), or that new robe which the milliner has just brought home to Mrs. Bumpsher's, and into which she will squeeze herself on Christmas-day? Miss Clapperclaw says that we are all so charmingly contented with ourselves that not one of us would change with his neighbor; and so, rich and poor, high and low, one person is about as happy as another in Our Street. DOCTOR BIRCH AND HIS YOUNG FRIENDS by MR. M. A. TITMARSH THE DOCTOR AND HIS STAFF. There is no need to say why I became assistant-master and professor of the English and French languages, flower-painting, and the German flute, in Doctor Birch's Academy, at Rodwell Regis. Good folks may depend on this, that it was not for CHOICE that I left lodgings near London, and a genteel society, for an under-master's desk in that old school. I promise you the fare at the usher's table, the getting up at five o'clock in the morning, the walking out with little boys in the fields, (who used to play me tricks, and never could be got to respect my awful and responsible character as teacher in the school,) Miss Birch's vulgar insolence, Jack Birch's glum condescension, and the poor old Doctor's patronage, were not matters in themselves pleasurable: and that that patronage and those dinners were sometimes cruel hard to swallow. Never mind--my connection with the place is over now, and I hope they have got a more efficient under-master.