(for he had some) are ended; but they were old Perennials,
staple, and always as good as new. He had one Song, that spake of the
"flat bottoms of our foes coming over in darkness," and alluded to a
threatened Invasion, many years since blown over; this he reserved to
be sung on Christmas Night, which we always passed with him, and he
sung it with the freshness of an impending event. How his eyes would
sparkle when he came to the passage:

We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat,
In spite of the devil and Brussels' Gazette!

What is the Brussels' Gazette now? I cry, while I endite these
trifles. His poor girls who are, I believe, compact of solid goodness,
will have to receive their afflicted mother at an unsuccessful home
in a petty village in ----shire, where for years they have been
struggling to raise a Girls' School with no effect. Poor deaf Robert
(and the less hopeful for being so) is thrown upon a deaf world,
without the comfort to his father on his death-bed of knowing him
provided for. They are left almost provisionless. Some life assurance
there is; but, I fear, not exceeding ----. Their hopes must be from
your Corporation, which their father has served for fifty years. Who
or what are your Leading Members now, I know not. Is there any, to
whom without impertinence, you can represent the true circumstances of
the family? You cannot say good enough of poor R., and his poor wife.
Oblige me and the dead, if you can.

OLD CHINA

I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see
any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for the
picture gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but by
saying, that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date
to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I
can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was
taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers
were introduced into my imagination.

I had no repugnance then--why should I now have?--to those little,
lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and
women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world
before perspective--a china tea-cup.

I like to see my old friends--whom distance cannot diminish--figuring
up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on _terra firma_
still--for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue,