all not
trample on the graves that are. We can agitate, and we will agitate
successfully against their asphalte. Let the City be mindful of its old
renown; let Vestries rally round Sir Peter Laurie, and there may be yet
secured to you, for seven years to come, an atmosphere which shall assist
in making Home Unhealthy.

III. Spending A Very Pleasant Evening.

By the consent of antiquity, it is determined that Pain shall be
doorkeeper to the house of Pleasure. In Europe Purgatory led to Paradise;
and, had St. Symeon lived among us now, he would have earned heaven, if
the police permitted, by praying for it, during thirty years, upon the
summit of a lamp-post. In India the Fakir was beatified by standing on his
head, under a hot sun, beset with roasting bonfires. In Greenland the soul
expected to reach bliss by sliding for five days down a rugged rock,
wounding itself, and shivering with cold. The American Indians sought
happiness through castigation, and considered vomits the most expeditious
mode of enforcing self-denial on the stomach. Some tribes of Africans
believe, that on the way to heaven every man's head is knocked against a
wall. By consent of mankind, therefore, it is granted that we must pass
Pain on the way to Pleasure.

What Pleasure is, when reached, none but the dogmatical can venture to
determine. To Greenlanders, a spacious fish-kettle, forever simmering, in
which boiled seals forever swim, is the delight of heaven. And remember
that, in the opinion of M. Bailly, Adam and Eve gardened in Nova Zembla.

You will not be surprised, therefore, if I call upon you to prepare for
your domestic pleasures with a little suffering; nor, when I tell you what
such pleasures are, must you exclaim against them as absurd. Having the
sanction of our forefathers, they are what is fashionable now, and
consequently they are what is fit.

I propose, then, that you should give, for the entertainment of your
friends, an Evening Party; and as this is a scene in which young ladies
prominently figure, I will, if you please, on this occasion, pay
particular attention to your daughter.

O mystery of preparation!--Pardon, sir. You err if you suppose me to
insinuate that ladies are more careful over personal adornment than the
gentlemen. When men made a display of manhood, wearing beards, it is
recorded that they packed them, when they went to bed, in pasteboard
cases, lest they might be tumbled in the night. Man at his g