the bars? or did you not quench with a sudden retort of small coal its impertinent congratulation at an unfortunate result? until, when its cordial glow, penetrating that unseemly shroud, has given evidence of self-conviction, you felt that you had dealt too harshly with an old friend, and hastened to make it up with him again by a playful titillation, more in jest than earnest.

But this is all to come. Not yet (with us) have the kindly old bars, reverend in their attenuation, been restored to their time-honoured throne; not yet have the dingy festoons of pink and white paper disappeared from the garish mantel. Still desolate and cheerless shows the noble edifice. The gaunt chimney yawns still in sick anticipation of deferred smoke. The “irons,” innocent of coal, and polished to the tip, skulk and cower sympathetically into the extreme corner of the fender. The very rug seems ghastly and grim, wanting the kindly play of the excited flame. We have no comfort in the parlour yet: even the privileged kitten, wandering in vain in search of a resting-place, deems it but a chill dignity which has withdrawn her from the warm couch before the kitchen-fire. Things have become too real for home. We have no joy now in those delicious loiterings for the five minutes before dinner—those casual snatches of Sterne, those scraps of Steele. We have left off smiling; we are impregnable even to a pun. What is the day of the month?

Surely were not October retrospectively associated (in April and glorious May) with the grateful magnificence of ale, none would be so unpopular as the chilly month. There is no period in which so much of what ladies call “unpleasantness” occurs, no season when that mysterious distemper known as “warming” is so epidemic, as in October. It is a time when, in default of being conventionally cold, every one becomes intensely cool. A general chill pervades the domestic virtues: hospitality is aguish, and charity becomes more than proverbially numb.

In twenty days how different an appearance will things wear! The magic circle round the hearth will be filled with beaming faces; a score of hands will be luxuriously chafing the palpable warmth dispensed by a social blaze; some more privileged feet may perchance be basking in the extraordinary recesses of the fender. We shall consult the thermometer to enjoy the cold weather by contrast with the glowing comfort within. We shall remark how “time flies,” and that “it seems only yesterday since we had a fire before;” forgetful of the hideous night and the troublous dreams that have intervened since those sweet memories. And all this—in twenty days.

We are no innovators: we respect all things for their age, and some for their youth. But we would hope that, in humbly looking for a fire in the cold weather, even though November be still in the store of time, we should be exhibiting no dangerous propensities. If, as we are inclined to believe, fires were discovered previously to the invention of lord mayors, wherefore should we defer our accession to them until he is welcomed by those frigid antiquities Gog and Magog? Wherefore not let fires go out with the old lord mayor, if they needs must come in with the new? Wherefore not do without lord mayors altogether, and elect an annual grate to judge the prisoners at the bar in the Mansion House, and to listen to the quirks of the facetious Mr. Hob-ler?

AN APPROPRIATE GIFT.

We perceive that the fair dames of Nottingham have, with compassionate liberality, presented to Mr. Walter, one of the Tory candidates at the late election, a silver salver. What a delicate and appropriate gift for a man so beaten as Master Walter!—the pretty dears knew where he was hurt, and applied a silver salve—we beg pardon, salver—to his wounds. We trust the remedy may prove consolatory to the poor gentleman.

NOT A STEP FA(R)THER.

The diminutive chroniclers of Animalcula-Chatter, called small-talk, have been giving a minute description of the goings on of His Grace of Wellington at Walmer. They hint that he sleeps and wakes by clock-work, eats by the ounce, and drinks and walks by measure. During the latter recreation, it is his pleasure, they tell us, to use one of Payne’s pedometers to regulate his march. Thus it is quite clear the great Captain will never become a