dies, and makes no apology for being such an unconscionable time in dying; and all the while it colours our thoughts with its own solemnity.  There is no relief from this kind of thing at midsummer.  You cannot close your shutters and light your candles; that in the tone of mind which circumstances superinduce would be brutality.  You cannot take Pickwick to the window and read it by the dying light; that is profanation.  If you have a friend with you, you can’t talk; the hour makes you silent.  You are driven in on your self-consciousness.  The long light wearies the eye, a sense of time disturbs and saddens the spirit; and that is the reason, I think, that one half of the year seems so much longer than the other half; that on the dial-plate whose hours are months, the restless finger seems to move more slowly when travelling upward from autumn leaves and snow to light, than when it is travelling downward from light to snow and withered leaves.

Of all the seasons of the year, I like winter best.  That peculiar burden of time I have been speaking of, does not affect me now.  The day is short, and I can fill it with work; when evening comes, I have my lighted room and my books.  Should black care haunt me, I throw it off the scent in Spenser’s forests, or seek refuge from it among Shakspeare’s men and women, who are by far the best company I have met with, or am like to meet with, on earth.  I am sitting at this present moment with my curtains drawn; the cheerful fire is winking at all the furniture in the room, and from every leg and arm the furniture is winking to the fire in return.  I put off the outer world with my great-coat and boots, and put on contentment and idleness with my slippers.  On the hearth-rug, Pepper, coiled in a shaggy ball, is asleep in the ruddy light and heat.  An imaginative sense of the cold outside increases my present comfort—­just as one never hugs one’s own good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortune which has overtaken others.  Winter has fallen on Dreamthorp, and it looks as pretty when covered with snow as when covered with apple blossom.  Outside, the ground is hard as iron; and over the low dark hill, lo! the tender radiance that precedes the morn.  Every window in the little village has its light, and to the traveller coming on, enveloped in his breath, the whole place shines like a congregation of glow-worms.  A pleasant enough sight to him if his home be there!  At this present season, the canal is not such a pleasant promenade as it was in summer.  The barges come and go as usual, but at this time I do not envy the bargemen quite so much.  The horse comes smoking along; the tarpaulin which covers the merchandise is sprinkled with hoar-frost; and the helmsman, smoking his short pipe for the mere heat of it, cowers over a few red cinders contained in a framework of iron.  The labour of the poor fellows will soon be over for a time; for if this