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 even the privileged kitten, wandering in vain in search of a resting-place, deems it but a chill dignity which has withdrawn her from the warm couch before the kitchen-fire.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 being conventionally cold, every one becomes intensely cool.  A general chill pervades the domestic virtues:  hospitality is aguish, and charity becomes more than proverbially numb.

In twenty days how different an appearance will things wear!  The magic circle round the hearth will be filled with beaming faces; a score of hands will be luxuriously chafing the palpable warmth dispensed by a social blaze; some more privileged feet may perchance be basking in the extraordinary recesses of the fender.  We shall consult the thermometer to enjoy the cold weather by contrast with the glowing comfort within.  We shall remark how “time flies,” and that “it seems only yesterday since we had a fire before;” forgetful of the hideous night and the troublous dreams that have intervened since those sweet memories.  And all this—­in twenty days.

We are no innovators:  we respect all things for their age, and some for their youth.  But we would hope that, in humbly looking for a fire in the cold weather, even though November be still in the store of time, we should be exhibiting no dangerous propensities.  If, as we are inclined to believe, fires were discovered previously to the invention of lord mayors, wherefore should we defer our accession to them until he is welcomed by those frigid antiquities Gog and Magog?  Wherefore not let fires go out with the old lord mayor, if they needs must come in with the new?  Wherefore not do without lord mayors altogether, and elect an annual grate to judge the prisoners at the bar in the Mansion House, and to listen to the quirks of the facetious Mr. Hob-ler?

* * * * *

AN APPROPRIATE GIFT.

We perceive that the fair dames of Nottingham have, with compassionate liberality, presented to Mr. Walter, one of the Tory candidates at the late election, a silver salver.  What a delicate and appropriate gift for a man so beaten as Master Walter!—­the pretty dears knew where he was hurt, and applied a silver salve—­we beg pardon, salver—­to his wounds.  We trust the remedy may prove consolatory to the poor gentleman.