your letters and newspapers arrive, you luxuriously read them, a very little at a time, and you soon forget all you have read.  You turn over and fall asleep for a while; then you read a little more.  Your reviving appetite makes simple food a source of real enjoyment.  The children come in, and tell you wonderful stories of all that has happened since you were ill.  They are a little subdued at first, but soon grow noisy as usual; and their noise does not in the least disturb you.  You hear it as though it were miles off.  After days and nights of great pain, you understand the blessing of ease and rest:  you are disposed to be pleased with everything, and everybody wants to please you.  The day passes away, and the evening darkness comes before you are aware.  Everything is strange, and everything is soothing and pleasant.  The only disadvantage is, that you grow so fond of lying in bed, that you shrink extremely from the prospect of ever getting up again.

Having arrived at this point, at 10.45 on this Friday evening, I gathered up all the pages which have been written, and carried them to the fireside, and sitting there, I read them over; and I confess, that on the whole, it struck me that the present essay was somewhat heavy.  A severe critic might possibly say that it was stupid.  I fancied it would have been rather good when it was sketched out; but it has not come up to expectation.  However, it is as good as I could make it; and I trust the next essay may be better.  It is a chance, you see, what the quality of any composition shall be.  Give me a handle to turn, and I should undertake upon every day to turn it equally well.  But in the working of the mental machine, the same pressure of steam, the same exertion of will, the same strain of what powers you have, will not always produce the same result.  And if you, reader, feel some disappointment at looking at a new work by an old friend, and finding it not up to the mark you expected, think how much greater his disappointment must have been as the texture rolled out from the loom, and he felt it was not what he had wished.  Here, to-night, the room and the house are as still as in my remembrance of the Solitary Days which are gone.  But they will not be still to-morrow morning; and they are so now because sleep has hushed two little voices, and stayed the ceaseless movements of four little pattering feet.  May those Solitary Days never return.  They are well enough when the great look-out is onward; but, oh! how dreary such days must be to the old man whose main prospect is of the past!  I cannot imagine a lot more completely beyond all earthly consolation, than that of a man from whom wife and children have been taken away, and who lives now alone in the dwelling once gladdened by their presence, but now haunted by their memory.  Let us humbly pray, my reader, that such a lot may never be yours or mine.

CHAPTER VIII.