SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
Office-Impost.—One of the most important of Petitions.
HE finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the giant Schadeck bed!—With the inflammatory, tickling, eating fever of love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling that he had now got the introductory programme of love put happily by; and with the sweet resurrection from his living, prophetic burial; and with the joy that now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he could ten years ago;—with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do it long; he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have been gratifying to have measured—as pilgrims measure with the length of their pilgrimage, not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like Earth-diameters—the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm, billowy life; he had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother down-stairs now admitted that he had last night actually glided
