, and Strephon seems to be playing on a pair of bellows. Damp
delights to descend chimneys, and is one of smoke's most powerful
auxiliaries. It is a thousand pities you hung up--just in that unlucky
spot--Grecian Williams's Thebes--for now one of the finest water-colour
paintings in the world is not worth six-and-eightpence. There is no
living in the country without a library. Take down, with all due
caution, that enormous tome, the _Excursion_, and let us hear something
of the Pedlar. There is an end to the invention of printing. Lo and
behold, blank verse indeed! You cannot help turning over twenty leaves
at once, for they are all amalgamated in must and mouldiness. Lord Byron
himself is no better than an Egyptian mummy; and the Great Unknown
addresses you in hieroglyphics.

We have heard different opinions maintained on the subject of damp
sheets. For our own part, we always wish to feel the difference between
sheets and cerements. We hate everything clammy. It is awkward, on
leaping out of bed to admire the moon, to drag along with you, glued
round your body and members, the whole paraphernalia of the couch. It
can never be good for rheumatism--problematical even for fever. Now, be
candid--did you ever sleep in perfectly dry sheets in a Cottage ornee?
You would not like to say "No, never," in the morning--privately, to
host or hostess. But confess publicly, and trace your approaching
retirement from all the troubles of this life, to the dimity-curtained
cubiculum on Tweedside.

We know of few events so restorative as the arrival of a coachful of
one's friends, if the house be roomy. But if everything there be on a
small scale, how tremendous a sudden importation of live cattle! The
children are all trundled away out of the Cottage, and their room given
up to the young ladies, with all its enigmatical and emblematical
wall-tracery. The captain is billeted in the boudoir, on a shake-down.
My lady's maid must positively pass the night in the butler's pantry,
and the valet makes a dormitory of the store-room. Where the old
gentleman and his spouse have been disposed of, remains as controversial
a point as the authorship of Junius; but next morning at the
breakfast-table, it appears that all have survived the night, and the
hospitable hostess remarks, with a self-complacent smile, that small as
the Cottage appears, it has wonderful accommodation, and could have
easily admitted half-a-dozen more patients. The visitors po