You toil from early morning till late at night. Your house, Mrs. Harddriver, is a dreadful treadmill, and you are as bad as a slave-driver. You are guilty of injustice and cruelty in depriving your servants of a little evening leisure-for self-improvement or correspondence with their friends, or the making up or repairing a necessary article of dress. are an unreasonable exacting woman, Mrs. Harddriver, and yet you are always "complaining of pains in your back and loins, and scarcely do anything yourself all day but hurry and drive your poor worn-out domestics. Is it wonderful that the two or three dozen servants who pass through your treadmill every year come out a brokenspirited, ill-conditioned contribution to the necessary evils" of social life? Mrs. Scolder, your irascible temper has spoiled many a good servant,-how many we shall not venture to guess, for you are an old housekeeper, and your name, we are informed, stands permanently on the books of Mrs. Gatherum, of the Domestic Registry Office. It is a bad thing, Mrs. Scolder, to be always blowing-up. Gunpowder is not a domestic article, and explosions don't promote domestic quietude and comfort. We don't excuse bad temper on the score of constitutional infirmity. Bad temper, like bad manners, is out of place in good society. Why your husband wont stand your temper, how then can you expect that your servants will? Hurricane Hall must be an uncomfortable residence, Mrs. Scolder, for others besides those below-stairs. Happily those below-stairs are not obliged to weather your boisterous north-westerly blasts, they have a privilege which those upstairs don't enjoy-they can give warning-they can go,-and they do go, eh! Mrs. Scolder, rather frequently. Well, this is our deliberate convictionthat, making all due allowance for the bad principles and fickle dispositions of a considerable number of servants, no small measure of blame attaches to the mistresses of our households, the large majority of whom are their own housekeepers, and not a few of whom make a pretty mess of their so-called housekeeping. We happen to know some highly respectable gentlemen who consider their wives rather than their servants "necessary evils," and heartily wish they could give them a month's notice to quit. An intimate friend of ours invariably speaks of his house as "the cauldron," there is always some seething, bubbling scum on the surface of his domestic life to disquiet and annoy him,-his servants are always coming and going,-the daily conversation is always about servants,-the last word he hears at night is about servants,—and he wakes in the morning to hear [Unusually early activity and bustle about the house awoke us. It was the morning following New Year's Day, and our housekeeper had received our permission to have a servants' party that evening. There was much, no doubt, to be done in the way of preparation, and the ordinary domestic duty was begun early and performed with more than customary activity and noise. Our excellent housekeeper, Mrs. Boniface apologized after breakfast for the unseasonable disturbance. We amused her with the substance of our dream, which probably she and her subordinates had been the means of suggesting, and she begged a copy of the sermon when it was printed, to read aloud in the servants' hall.] SERMON VIII. POPPY-HEADS. "The juice of the Poppy (Papaver Somniferum) is the Opium of commerce, cultivated in Turkey and other Eastern countries. It is obtained from an incision in the stalk, made longitudinally just under the bulbous capsule which contains the rudiments of the flower. As it exudes in the form of a gum it is gathered by women and children."Vide Accounts of the Cultivation of the Poppy in India, and the Opium Commerce. A BIOGRAPHER of Wordsworth tells us that he shall never forget hearing a poet, and no mean one, read to him, for the first time, the |