Man naturally requires excitement and relaxation; but it is essentially necessary that they should be adapted to his situation and circumstances. The _feast week_, however alluring it may appear in description, is in reality productive of greater evil than good. The excitement lasts too long, and the enjoyment, whatever it may be, is purchased at the sacrifice of too great expense. It is a well-known fact, that many of the poor who have exerted every effort to make this profuse, but short-lived display, have scarcely bread to eat for weeks after. But there is no alternative, if they expect to be received with the same spirit of hospitality by their friends. The alehouses, in the interim, are too often scenes of drunkenness and disorder; and the labouring man who has been idle and dissipated for a week, is little disposed for toil and temperance the next. Here, then, the illusion of rural simplicity ends! These things are managed much better where one _fair day_, as it is called, is set apart in each year, as is the case in many counties; the excitement, which is intense for ten or twelve hours, is fully sufficient for the purpose; all is noise and merriment, and one general and simultaneous burst and explosion, if it may be so expressed, takes place. You see groups of happy faces. Every one is willing “to laugh he knows not why, and cares not wherefore;” and _one day’s_ gratification serves him for _every day’s_ pleasing topic of reference for weeks to come. S. P. NATURALISTS’ CALENDAR. Mean Temperature 35·62. ~January 12.~ _Leeches unhurt by Frost._ Among the cold-blooded animals which resist the effects of a low temperature, we may reckon the common leech, which is otherwise interesting to the meteorologist, on account of its peculiar habits and movements under different states of the atmosphere. A group of these animals left accidentally in a closet without a fire, during the frost of 1816, not only survived, but appeared to suffer no injury from being locked up in a mass of ice for many days.[25] SWEEPING RHETORIC.