icing, permit me to tender to yourself, and by you to your
Sister, mine and my Wife's heartfelt congratulations and warmest
wishes with respect to the coming year. It is a common belief
that if we take a retrospective view of each departing year, as
it behoves us annually to do, we shall find the blessings which
we have received to immeasurably outnumber our causes of sorrow.
Speaking for myself I can fully subscribe to that sentiment, and
doubtless neither Miss --- nor yourself are exceptions. Miss ---
's illness and consequent confinement to the house has been a
severe trial, but in that trouble an opportunity was afforded you
to prove a Sister's devotion and she has been enabled to realise
a larger (if possible) display of sisterly affection.

"A happy Christmas to you both, and may the new year prove a
Cornucopia from which still greater blessings than even those we
have hitherto received, shall issue, to benefit us all by
contributing to our temporal happiness and, what is of higher
importance, conducing to our felicity hereafter.

"I was sorry to hear that you were so annoyed with mice and rats,
and if I should have an opportunity to obtain a nice cat I will
do so and send my boy to your house with it.

"I remain,

"Yours truly."

How little what is commonly called education can do after all
towards the formation of a good style, and what a delightful volume
might not be entitled "Half Hours with the Worst Authors." Why, the
finest word I know of in the English language was coined, not by my
poor old grandfather, whose education had left little to desire, nor
by any of the admirable scholars whom he in his turn educated, but
by an old matron who presided over one of the halls, or houses of
his school. This good lady, whose name by the way was Bromfield,
had a fine high temper of her own, or thought it politic to affect
one. One night when the boys were particularly noisy she burst like
a hurricane into the hall, collared a youngster, and told him he was
the "rampingest-scampingest-rackety-tackety-tow-row-roaringest boy
in the whole school." Would Mrs. Newton have been able to set the
aunt and the dog before us so vividly if she had been more highly
educated? Would Mrs. Bromfield have been able to forge and hurl her
thunderbolt of a word if she had been taught how to do so, or indeed
been at much pains to create it at all? It came. It was her
[Greek]. She did not probably know that she had done wha