black with dust and age.  To crown the whole, a friend comes with a piece of twine extending across two rooms, and asks you to help him twist and double it into a cord.  It is a very entertaining process.  You amuse yourself with watching one little rough place that whirls swiftly round, stops with a jerk, turns hesitatingly one side and the other, then, yielding to a new impulse, flies round and round again till you are dizzy.  You look with great complacency at the tightening twist, now brought almost to perfection.  You turn it carelessly in your fingers, scarcely noticing its convulsive starts for freedom.  Ah! your imprudent friend, without any warning, gives it a final pull to stretch it into shape.  The twine slips from your grasp, springs away across the room, curls itself into a succession of snarls and twisted loops, and then lies motionless.  Your friend looks thunderstruck.  With a hasty apology, you step forward and tightly clasp the recreant end.  You are in nervous expectation of dropping it again.  Your fingers are benumbed at the tips with their tight compression, and the constant twitching.  They give a sudden jerk.  You make an involuntary clutch for the cord, but in vain.  It is rapidly untwisting at the very feet of your companion, who looks at it in despair.  Again you make an attempt with no success at all, the refractory twine eluding your utmost endeavors to hold it.  Once more!  Your fellow-twister walks off at last, with a wretchedly rough affair, which he good humoredly says “will do very well.”

MISERIES.

No. 4.

I believe the world has gone quite crazy on the subject of fresh air.  In the next century people will think they must sleep on the house-tops, I suppose, or camp out in tents in primitive style.  Nothing is talked about but ventilators, and air-tubes, and chimney-draughts.  One would suppose that fire-places were invented expressly for cooling and airing a room, instead of heating it.  There was no such fuss when I was young; in those good old times these airy notions had not come into fashion.  Where the loose window-sashes rattled at every passing breeze, and the wind chased the smoke down the wide-mouthed chimney, nobody complained of being stifled.  There were no furnaces then to spread a summer heat to every corner of the house.  No, indeed!  We ran shivering through the long, windy entries, all wrapped in shawls, and hugging ourselves to retain the friendly warmth of the fire as long as possible.  Far from devising ways of letting in the air, we tried hard to keep it out by stuffing the cracks with cotton, and closely curtaining the windows and bed.  Even then, the ice in the wash-basin, and the electricity which made our hair literally stand on end in the process of combing, and the gradual transformation of fingers into thumbs, showed but too plainly that the wintry air had penetrated our defences.  When