actually placed on the table, to hang back from using or offering them to others, is a deliberate infatuation. They _must be_ destroyed, they _could not_ appear again; and yet this person’s heart failed her, and shrank back from the only opportunity of making the proper use of them with a petty, sensitive apprehension, as if it were a kind of sacrilege done to a cherished and favourite object. The impulse to save was become, by indulgence, a sort of desperate propensity and forlorn hope, no longer the understood means, but the mistaken end: habit had completely superseded the exercise and control of reason, and the rage of making the most of every thing _by making no use of it at all_, resisted to the last moment the shocking project of feasting on a helpless dish of green-peas (that _would_ fetch so much in the market) as an outrage against the Goddess of stinginess, and torture to the soul of thrift! The principle of economy is inverted; and in order to avoid the possibility of wasting any thing, the way with such philosophers and housewives is to abstain from touching it altogether. Is not this a common error? Or are we conscious of our motives in such cases? [Or do we not flatter ourselves by imputing every such act of idle folly to the necessity of adopting some sure and judicious plan to shun ruin, beggary, and the most profligate abuse of wealth? An old maid in the same northern school of humanity calling upon some young ladies, her neighbours, was so alarmed and scandalized at finding the _safe_ open in their absence, that she engaged herself to drink tea the same afternoon, for the express purpose of reading them a lecture on the unheard-of imprudence and impropriety of such an example, and was mobbed on her way home by the poor servant-girl (who had been made the subject of her declamation) in return for her uncalled-for interference. _She_ had nothing to fear, nothing to lose: _her_ safe was carefully locked up. Why then all this flutter, fidgetty anxiety, and itch of meddling? Out of pure romantic generosity—because the idea of any thing like comfort or liberality to a servant shocked her economical and screwed-up prejudices as much as the impugning any article of her religious or moral creed could have done. The very truisms and literal refinements of this passion are then sheer impertinence. The housekeeper came into the parlour of a ‘_big ha’ house_,’ in the same land of cakes and hospitality, to say that the workmen had refused to eat their dinner.—‘Why so?’—Because there was nothing but sowins and sour milk.—‘Then they must go without a dinner,’ said the young mistress delighted; ‘there is nothing else in the house for them.’ Yet the larder at that time groaned with cold rounds of beef, hams, pasties, and the other plentiful remains of a huge entertainment the day before. This was flippancy and ill-nature, as well as a wrong notion of self-interest. Is it at all wonderful that a decent servant-girl, when applied to to go to