_Expectata dies_,—long looked for, at length it came. The box was brought into the parlour, the ripping-chissel was produced, the nails were easily forced, the cover was lifted, and the paper which lay beneath it was removed. There's the pantaloons! was the first exclamation. The clothes being taken out, there appeared below a paper parcel, secured with string. As I never encourage any undue impatience, the string was deliberately and carefully untied. Behold, the splendid Pocket-Book, and the history of the Lioness and the Exeter Mail,—had been forgotten! O St. Peter! St. Peter! “Pray, Sir,” says the Reader, “as I perceive you are a person who have a reason for every thing you say, may I ask wherefore you call upon St. Peter on this occasion.” You may Sir. A reason there is and a valid one. But what that reason is, I shall leave the commentators to discover; observing only, for the sake of lessening their difficulty, that the Peter upon whom I have called is not St. Peter of Verona, he having been an Inquisitor, one of the Devil's Saints, and therefore in no condition at this time to help any body who invokes him. “Well Papa, you must write about them, and they must come in the next parcel,” said the children. Job never behaved better, who was a scriptural Epictetus; nor Epictetus who was a heathen Job. I kissed the little philosophers; and gave them the Bellman's verses, which happened to come in the box, with horrific cuts of the Marriage at Cana, the Ascension and other portions of gospel history, and the Bellman himself,—so it was not altogether a blank. We agreed that the disappointment should be an adjourned pleasure, and then I turned to inspect the pantaloons. I cannot approve the colour. It hath too much of the purple; not that imperial die by which ranks were discriminated at Constantinople, nor the more sober tint which Episcopacy affecteth. Nor is it the bloom of the plum;—still less can it be said to resemble the purple light of love. No! it is rather a hue brushed from the raven's wing, a black purple; not Night and Aurora meeting, which would make the darkness blush; but Erebus and Ultramarine. Doubtless it hath been selected for me because of its alamodality,—a good and pregnant word, on the fitness of which some German whose name appears to be erroneously as well as uncouthly written Geamoenus, is said to have composed a dissertation. Be pleased Mr. Todd to insert it in the interleaved copy of your dictionary! Thankful I am that they are not like Jean de Bart's full dress breeches; for when that famous sailor went to court he is said to have worn breeches of cloth of gold, most uncomfortably as well as splendidly lined with cloth of silver. He would never have worn them had he read Lampridius, and seen the opinion of the Emperor Alexander Severus as by that historian recorded: “_in lineâ autem aurum mitti etiam dementiam judicabat, cum asperitati adderetur rigor._”