where there
might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to
paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--things
dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the
spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned
into things one cannot do without.

The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the
better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the
little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on
the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing;
and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What
a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round
flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich,
varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull,
stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or
admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having
merely been bought!

Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an
honourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--the
presents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuine
present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last
buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints,
out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long
self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for that
faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to
one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a
proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding
presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to
summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.

But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compass than the
other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and
diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.

GOING AWAY

We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled her
away. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the misty
flare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darkness
of the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons--myself
especially--a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact o