seemed contrary to yours, did you not endeavour to betray the sparks into
an untenable position, by submitting them to the gentle sophistry of a
poker nicely insinuated between the bars? or did you not quench with a
sudden retort of small coal its impertinent congratulation at an
unfortunate result? until, when its cordial glow, penetrating that
unseemly shroud, has given evidence of self-conviction, you felt that you
had dealt too harshly with an old friend, and hastened to make it up with
him again by a playful titillation, more in jest than earnest.

But this is all to come. Not yet (with us) have the kindly old bars,
reverend in their attenuation, been restored to their time-honoured
throne; not yet have the dingy festoons of pink and white paper
disappeared from the garish mantel. Still desolate and cheerless shows the
noble edifice. The gaunt chimney yawns still in sick anticipation of
deferred smoke. The "irons," innocent of coal, and polished to the tip,
skulk and cower sympathetically into the extreme corner of the fender. The
very rug seems ghastly and grim, wanting the kindly play of the excited
flame. We have no comfort in the parlour yet: even the privileged kitten,
wandering in vain in search of a resting-place, deems it but a chill
dignity which has withdrawn her from the warm couch before the
kitchen-fire. Things have become too real for home. We have no joy now in
those delicious loiterings for the five minutes before dinner--those
casual snatches of Sterne, those scraps of Steele. We have left off
smiling; we are impregnable even to a pun. What _is_ the day of the month?

Surely were not October retrospectively associated (in April and glorious
May) with the grateful magnificence of ale, none would be so unpopular as
the chilly month. There is no period in which so much of what ladies call
"unpleasantness" occurs, no season when that mysterious distemper known as
"warming" is so epidemic, as in October. It is a time when, in default of