Children are too often unkind to one another, and deny the allowance they so much need in their own case. - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Mrs. Burgoyne passed the last twenty years of her life in a large, solemn-looking house at Kensington ; it is now a mad-house. How curiously do these changes in dwelling places, once cheerful and familiar, bring the mutability of our existence home ! It would be an eventful chronicle, the history of even a few of the old-fashioned houses in the vicinity of London. You ascended a flight of steps, with a balustrade and two indescribable birds on either side, and a large hall, which, strange to say, was more cheerful in winter than in summer. In summer the narrow windows, the black wood with which it was panelled, seemed heavy and dull ; but in winter the huge fire gave its own gladness, and had besides the association with old English hospitality which a blazing grate always brings. You passed next through two long drawing-rooms, whose white wainscoting was almost covered with family portraits. There cannot be much said for the taste of Queen Anne's time downwards — bagged, wigged, and hooped ; there was not a picture of which the African's question might not have been asked, "Pray tell me, white woman, if this is all you?”

The poor child, as Charles Lamb so touchingly expresses it, is not brought, but "dragged out," and if the wits are sharpened, so, too, is the soft, round cheek. The crippled limb and broken constitution attest the effects of the over-early struggle with penury; but the child of rich parents suffers, though in another way; there is the heart that is crippled, by the selfishness of indulgence and the habit of relying upon others. It takes years of harsh contact with the realities of life to undo the enervating work of a spoilt and over aided childhood. We cannot too soon learn the strong and useful lessons of exertion and self-dependance.

Indeed it is a doubtful fact whether clever people are ever very agreeable ; they are too much absorbed by one particular pursuit, to bound lightly enough over those generalities which are the stepping-stones of conversation ; they feel as if they ought to say something worth remembering.