A WINTER’S DAY. _For the Table Book._ The horizontal sun, like an orb of molten gold, casts “a dim religious light” upon the surpliced world: the beams, reflected from the dazzling snow, fall upon the purple mists, which extend round the earth like a zone, and in the midst the planet appears a fixed stud, surpassing the ruby in brilliancy. Now trees and shrubs are borne down with sparkling congelations, and the coral clusters of the hawthorn and holly are more splendid, and offer a cold conserve to the wandering schoolboy. The huntsman is seen riding to covert in his scarlet livery, the gunner is heard at intervals in the uplands, and the courser comes galloping down the hill side, with his hounds in full chase before him. The farmer’s boy, who is forced from his warm bed, to milk cows in a cold meadow, complains it’s a “burning” shame that he should be obliged to go starving by himself, while “their wench” has nothing else to do but make a fire, and boil the tea-kettle. Now, Mrs. Jeremy Bellclack, properly so called, inasmuch as the unmentionables are amongst her peculiar attributes, waked by the mail-coach horn, sounding an Introit to the day, orders her husband, poor fellow, to “just get up and look what sort of a morning it is;” and he, shivering at the _bare_ idea, affects to be fast asleep, till a second summons, accompanied by the contact of his wife’s heavy hand, obliges him to paddle across the ice-cold plaster floor; and the trees and church-steeples, stars, spears, and saws, which form an elegant tapestry over the windows, seem to authorize the excuse that he “can’t see,” while, shivering over the dressing-table, he pours a stream of visible breath on the frozen pane.