Philosophers tell us that we know nothing but from its opposite; then I certainly know my two aunts very perfectly, for greater opposites were never made since the formation of light and darkness; but they were both good creatures--so are light and darkness both good things in their place. My two aunts, however, were not so appropriately to be compared to light and darkness as to crumb and crust--the crumb and crust of a new loaf; the crumb of which is marvellously soft, and the crust of which is exceedingly crisp, dry and snappish. The one was my father's sister, and the other was my mother's; and very curiously it happened that they were both named Bridget. To distinguish between them, we young folks used to call the quiet and easy one aunt Bridget, and the bustling, worrying one, aunt Fidget. You never, in the whole course of your life, saw such a quiet, easy, comfortable creature as aunt Bridget--she was not immoderately large, but prodigiously fat. Her weight did not exceed twenty stone, or two-and-twenty at the utmost--but she might be called prodigiously fat, because she was all fat; I don't think there was an ounce of lean in her whole composition. She was so imperturbably good natured, that I really do not believe that she was ever in a passion in the whole course of her life. I have no doubt that she had her troubles: we all have troubles, more or less; but aunt Bridget did not like to trouble herself to complain. The greatest trouble that she endured, was the alternation of day and night: it was a trouble to her to go up stairs to bed, and it was a trouble to her to come down stairs to breakfast; but, when she was once in bed, she could sleep ten hours without dreaming; and when she was once up, and seated in her comfortable arm-chair, by the fireside, with her knitting apparatus in order, and a nice, fat, flat, comfortable quarto volume on a small table at her side, the leaves of which volume she could turn over with her knitting needle, she was happy for the day: the grief of getting up was forgotten, and the trouble of getting to bed was not anticipated. Knowing her aversion to moving, I was once saucy enough to recommend her to make two days into one, that she might not have the trouble of going up and down stairs so often. Any body but aunt Bridget would have boxed my ears for my impertinence, and would, in so doing, have served me rightly; but she, good creature, took it all in good part, and said, "Yes, my dear, it would save trouble, but I am afraid it would not be good for my health--I should not have exercise enough." Aunt Bridget loved quiet, and she lived in the quietest place in the world. There is not a spot in the deserts of Arabia, or in the Frozen Ocean, to be for a moment compared for quietness with Hans-place-- "The very houses seem asleep;"