ar as possible to first principles. It's a better way,
too, of keeping out the rain, than my t'other plan of flogging
people when they're young, to make their hides hard and
water-proof. A good licking is a sound first principle for
juveniles, but they've got a prejudice agin it.'

'A pair of Slippers' brings us acquainted with another original personage,
who one dark night soliloquizes on this wise:

''I'VE not the slightest doubt that this is as beautiful a night
as ever was; only it's so dark you can't see the pattern of it.
One night is pretty much like another night in the dark; but it's
a great advantage to a good-looking evening, if the lamps are lit,
so you can twig the stars and the moonshine. The fact is, that in
this 'ere city, we do grow the blackest moons, and the hardest
moons to find, I ever did see. Lamps is lamps, and moons is moons,
in a business pint of view, but practically they ain't much if the
wicks ain't afire. When the luminaries are, as I may say, in the
raw, it's bad for me. I can't see the ground as perforately as
little fellers, and every dark night I'm sure to get a hyst;
either a forrerd hyst, or a backerd hyst, or some sort of a hyst;
but more backerds than forrerds, 'specially in winter. One of the
most unfeeling tricks I know of, is the way some folks have got of
laughing out, yaw-haw! when they see a gentleman ketching a
reg'lar hyst; a long gentleman, for instance, with his legs in the
air, and his noddle splat down upon the cold bricks. A hyst of
itself is bad enough, without being sniggered at: first, your
sconce gets a crack; then, you see all sorts of stars, and have
free admission to the fire-works; then, you scramble up, feeling
as if you had no head on your shoulders, and as if it wasn't you,
but some confounded disagreeable feller in your clothes; yet the
jacksnipes all grin, as if the misfortunes of human nature was
only a poppet show. I wouldn't mind it, if you could get up and
look as if you didn't care. But a man can't rise, after a royal
hyst, without letting on he feels flat. In such cases, however,
sympathy is all gammon; and as for sensibility of a winter's day,
people keep it all for their own noses, and can't be coaxed to
retail it by the small.'

'DILLY JONES' is one of those unfortunate wights 'just whose luck' it is
never to succee