How many more have you, not absolutely lost, but to a certain extent abused, at breakfast--sip, sipping away at unnecessary cups of sirupy tea, or gob, gobbling away at jam-buttered rolls, for which nature never called--or "to party giving up what was meant for mankind"--forgetting the loss of Time in the Times, and, after a long, blank, brown, and blue study, leaving behind you a most miserable chronicle indeed! Then think--O think--on all your aimless forenoon saunterings--round and round about the premises--up and down the avenue--then into the garden on tiptoe--in and out among the neat squares of onion-beds--now humming a tune by the brink of abysses of mould, like trenches dug for the slain in the field of battle, where the tender celery is laid--now down to the river-side to try a little angling, though you well know there is nothing to be had but Pars--now into a field of turnips, without your double-barreled Joe Manton, (at Mr. Wilkinson's to be repaired,) to see Ponto point a place where once a partridge had pruned himself--now home again, at the waving of John's red sleeve, to receive a coach-full of country cousins, come in the capacity of forenoon callers--endless talkers all--sharp and blunt noses alike--and grinning voraciously in hopes of a lunch--now away to dress for dinner, which will not be for two long, long hours to come--now dozing, or daized on the drawing-room sofa, wondering if the bell is ever to be rung--now grimly gazing on a bit of bloody beef which your impatience has forced the blaspheming cook to draw from the spit ere the outer folds of fat were well melted at the fire--now, after a disappointed dinner, discovering that the old port is corked, and the filberts all pluffing with bitter snuff, except such as enclose a worm--now an unwholesome sleep of interrupted snores, your bobbing head ever and anon smiting your breast-bone--now burnt-beans palmed off on the family for Turkish coffee--now a game at cards, with a dead partner, and the ace of spades missing--now no supper--you have no appetite for supper--and now into bed tumbles the son of Genius, complaining to the moon of the shortness of human life, and the fleetness of time! _Blackwood's Magazine_. * * * * * SLEEPING AFTER DINNER.