My presents please you, then? Now God bless them! Little pleasures are as good as great ones; and we ought diligently to study the art of creating to ourselves such, far oftener than we do; there is abundance of cheap materials for the purpose: but no superstition must intrude--like that which you express about the scissars. Good Julia, the scissars are not yet invented which can cut our love;--they must be crab-like, and with a backward action cut away all memory of the past. Now I must scold you for another thing. To what end did I send you all that beautiful coloured 'blotting-paper,' if you relapse into the horrid fashion of strewing sand on your paper, which is as unknown in England as sanded floors? Several ounces of this ingredient in your correspondence flew in my face when I opened your letter. Will you, too, throw dust[80] in my eyes, dear Julia? and has Jeremiah brought you a new serious sand-box for the purpose from B----? I am very industrious, and employ my leisure in putting in order several volumes of my life-atlas. The whole day long I arrange, cut, write, (for you know there's a commentary to every picture)--in short all that a poor sick man can do to pass time. Behold, with your mind's eye, twenty folio volumes of the classic work standing in our library, and ourselves, grown old and bowed, sitting before them, rather doting, but still triumphing in the glorious old times. Young shot-up things are laughing by stealth behind our backs: flying out and in; and when one of them asks "What are the old people about?" another answers, "O! they are sitting poring over their picture-bible, and have no eyes nor ears for anything else." Now this is what I should like to live to see, and it always seems to me as if it must come to this. What lies between, however--that indeed God only knows. Bellows now cut a great figure in the newspapers. An ass, poisoned by way of experiment, was restored to life by continual blowing into his lungs; and the Houses of Parliament are going to be furnished with pure air during the whole sessions by means of a great pair of bellows. As an infallible remedy against suffocation, nothing more is necessary than to hold the patient by the nose, and blow common atmospheric air into his lungs, with the bellows out of the chimney corner. There will therefore be a greater number of puffed-up people in England now than ever. _Feb. 12th._