A preparation sooted to the most fastidious taste. Making a mull of it. Sen. Nay, the contrary is quite as bad, viz. : 54. At the instant of drawing the cork, starting back from the eagerly expected burst of froth, but without the least occasion either for your hopes or fears-the liquor all remaining in the bottle as quiet as a lamb. 55. In preparing mulled wine for yourself and friends after it has remained the proper time upon the fire, and just as you are taking it off, and all are rousing for the regale-seeing an avalanche of soot plump into the pot. 56. While you are swallowing a raspberry, discovering by its taste that you have been so unhappy as to occasion the death of a harmless insect! 57. Your tongue coming in contact with the skin of a peach. Sen. Yes, or even the mind coming in contact with the idea! 58. Your sensations about the throat and chest, after having too hastily forced down a piece of very hard dry biscuit--just as if you were swallowing a nutmeg-grater three or four yards long. Tes. Well, we have got through with the miseries of eating; what comes next in order? Sen. The miseries of digesting; in real life. Tes. Ha, ha! Very true. But those we must leave to the imagination-I'm afraid I ought to say the memory-of most people, with all the nauseous drugs the idea suggests. Ned Tes. May I my capacity ne'er so full fill, O, 6 Miseries domestic. House-cleaning. CHAPTER VIII. Miseries domestic. House-cleaning.-Houses were always coaled till the furnaces flue to the rescue.-A lock, no key. A chimney, smoky. A carpet-clawing. A blister-drawing.-Buil Ding-a nuisance, alone; and prolific in little Bills, besides.-The city most opposed to the introduction of gas.—Spermaceti.—Trouble in a gas-tly shape-not to be made light of.-Candle miseries. There's no rest for the wick-ed.-The Augean stables. (Corruption from haw-gee-in'-being oxstables.)-The closing table, (though not the last,) not of contents but of discontents.-Misfortune's dyer-fast colors. An over-T-urn.-Dressing-room miseries. The love of dress-what an anomaly!-Bad habits; the more they are broken, the worse they get-Rank ley in the nostrils makes rancor lie in the heart.—A brush with the bristles. The raiser of recollections of en-jaw-ments.-Paring and re-paring till repairing is impossible.-Pantaloons. A fit-not like a glove, but like a convulsion.-A crumb-not of comfort. The penalty of loaf-ing in bed.→ A coat changed from a beauty to a b-u-t-for ridicule.-A leak-more tearful even than an onion!-Night-attacks of mosquitoes, &c., that make one regret the old "Knights in armor."-Cold weather. Nurses. (Both suggestive of Lap-land.)— After all, the worst thing about a bed is—getting up.-The stamp of ill-breeding. 1. Getting up early on a cold, gloomy morning, (quite enough already, you'll say; but that's not half of it,)-Getting up early on a cold, gloomy morning, I say, and on running down into the breakfast-room for warmth and comfort, finding chairs, tables, shovel, poker, tongs, and fender, huddled into the middle of the room- -dust flying in all directions-carpet tossed backwards-floor newly washed-window wide open-beeswax, brush, and rubber, in one corner-brooms, mops, and pails, in another-and a dingy maid on her knees, before an empty grate. Tes. There's a set of jewels for our cabinet of miseries! -all of the first water, and in the rightest order for our use! Sen. I had myself intended to open with another of the same species; but you have struck me dumb. Tes. Pho, pho!-let's have it; when a diamond does not come in the way, we must put up with a pearl. Houses were always coaled till the furnaces flue-to the rescue. Sen. Well, then, if you won't despise me : 2. Having to pass the maid as she is scouring the stairs-to which I intended to add, seeing, hearing, or guessing any thing at all of the matter, when washing and drying are going on in the house; or, what is worse still, having to duck and flap your way through lines, or rather lanes, of clammy clothes, just hung out to dry. 3. On coming into the room, frost-bitten-attempting to stir a very compact fire with a red-hot poker, which, from being worn to a thread towards the bottom, bends double at the slightest touch, without discomposing a coal. Sen. Yes; or, on the other hand, 4. Raising them too much, when the grate is overcharged; and so, notwithstanding all your caution, disposing the live coals over the carpet, and among the petticoats of the ladies. 5. Feeling your arm and elbow cold; and, on looking farther into the matter, perceiving that you have long been leaning in slop, which has dabbled you to the skin. 6. Squatting plump on an unsuspected and unsuspecting cat in your chair. 7. Visiting at a house long accustomed to a furnace, where the ideas of the inhabitants (as they always do) have risen thermometrically ever since they had coal-fires; as you have still. 8. The vice versa of the above. 9. At going to bed-after having toiled, scorched, and melted yourself, in raking out a large and obstinate fire, which, at last, you seem to have effected; seeing it, as you turn round at the door, burning and roaring up far more fiercely than ever. 10. In attempting to throw up cinders-oversetting and scattering them far and wide, by dashing the edge of the shovel, as if with a violent determination, against the upper bar of the grate. A lock, no key. A chimney, smoky. A carpet-clawing. A blister-drawing. 11. Fumbling in vain at a rusty, refractory door-lock, of which the hasp flies backwards, and there sticks; so that you are at last obliged to leave the door flapping and whining on its unoiled hinge, and fanning you into an ague-your own fury furnishing the fever. 12. Sitting for hours before a smoky chimney, like a Hottentot in a kraal; then, just as your sufferings seem, at last, to be at an end-puff, puff!-whiff, whiff!—again, far more furiously than ever. 13. Waking, stiff and frozen, from a long sleep in your chair by the fireside; then crouching closer and closer over the miserable embers, for want of courage to go up to bed; and so, keeping in the cold to be warm! —when you go at last, your candle flickers out in the passage, and you are left to grope your way, blundering, and breaking your shins at every step, against the balusters; every stair, too, creaking and groaning under your weight, though you tread as tenderly as possible, for fear of waking the house, consisting chiefly of invalids, whom you feel that you are rousing, one after another, from their dozes, as you pass their several doors. 14. Elbowing both your candles off the table, and then setting them up in the shape of siphons. 15. Toiling at a rotten cork with a broken screw, and so dragging it out piecemeal, except the fragments, which drop into the bottle. 16. Grinding coals or cinders into the carpet, in turning upon your heel; then, after stooping, in a frenzy, to pick up the filthy fragments, and at last walking away satisfied that you have done so; crushing fresh parcels of them in other parts, and so on. Ned Tes. A great injury to your property, and a grater to your feelings. 17. After taking infinite pains to paste a drawing, or other choice thing, very nicely-seeing the paper, with all your pressing and smoothing in one part, start up in a thousand bulbous blisters in other places. 18. Just as you have finished dressing yourself more nicely than Buil Ding-a nuisance, alone; and prolific in little Bills, besides. usual, to receive company at dinner-creeping down into a dark, damp cellar, for wine; and unexpectedly finding, from a sudden chill about the lower part of the leg, that you are going by water. 19. Losing the keys of all your most private repositories; by which you suffer a double embarrassment-that you cannot, yourself, get at what you want; and that they have, probably, fallen into the hands of others, who both can and will. 20. After having ordered from town some articles of dress, furniture, ornament, &c., to be made on some particular model, which you had most solicitously explained to the workman before you went into the country—receiving it, at length, at the moment when it is most wanted, with this only drawback on your satisfaction, that it is so perversely wrong, in all possible respects, as to be absolutely useless! 21. Going on with a servant in whose honesty you have strong reasons for suspecting a leak, though not quite strong enough to warrant you in proceeding to a close charge, and search. 22. Beginning your residence at the country-house to which you have just removed, before the repairs are finished-with the comfort of picking your way from one ruined room to another, through fragments of peeled mortar, broken bricks, scattered axes, adzes, chisels, &c.; and, at length, being invaded in the fortress of your study, and there pursuing your meditations to the sound of hammers, files, saws, tumbling walls, &c., &c.; not to mention the manner in which you drag on your domestic existence for a long time, before half the furniture, utensils, &c., from your late house, have arrived, to wit: bed-chambers blocked up with matted trunks, bureaus, &c.; not a curtain or carpet to cover the nakedness of the sittingrooms, &c., &c. Then for your eating accommodations-dinner dressed by the housemaid, with extempore spits, en attendant the arrival of the bonâ fide cook, and her apparatus; every dish, as it is brought in, carrying a "noli me tangere" on the face of it, and, such as it is, being served up on the kitchen table, with a set-out of crockery from the same apartmentteaspoons to the salt-cellars, or rather the egg-cups their proxies—a man's white knife to a child's green fork, &c., &c.; no alliance as yet formed with the butcher, baker, carrier, &c., &c.; and lastly, when your time, with all |