At one o'clock, the officers of the civil service
lay aside their uniforms, and dress themselves
in full evening costume to pay private visits.
The inhabitants of every city in Russia are
hurrying about on this errand, from one o'clock
till five or six. Every one expects a visit from
all his or her acquaintances on New Year's Day,
and these visits must be paid in person, or
offence will be taken. To be sure, well-disposed
people have the grace to say, "Not at home,"
or one could never get through the hard work
of the day: but some tabbies and half-bedridden
old fellows are glad of the occasion to renew
their acquaintance with the world; and the half-
frozen visitor must unpack himself from his furs
and submit to be shown through long suites of
stifling rooms into one of the temperature of an
oven, and to talk bald talk for an hour with
somebody he sees but once a year.

Towards five o'clock, the rush of carriages
and the hurrying of footsteps through the streets
begin to slacken, and at six it is all over. There
is no particular festivity on New Year's Night;
the crouching outcast passes silently into the
death swoon; and the dreadful cold smites
pitilessly out of doors, while we gather round our
hearths, and keep our homes again.

FELICIA CROMPTON.

"I AM Miss Bessie Crompton, Pim," I said.

I spoke with the dignity of a young lady
fresh from a boarding-school. I had been at
the Clergy Daughters' School for four years,
being educated for the express purpose of
becoming a teacher; yet when my allotted term
was ended, my sister Felicia, who had been a
governess herself, decidedly declined the offer
of the lady superintendent to find me a situation,
and desired that I should return home at
once. Yet though I had been absent so long,
only old Pim, our servant, who had been errand-
boy to my father's grammar-school longer than
I could remember, met me at the station. I
was almost ashamed of recognising him as he
waited at the back of the platform, in an
antiquated, threadbare black suit of my father's,
looking like the embodiment of decrepitude and
poverty, and blinking with a bewildered,
purblind gaze, at the long train and crowd of
passengers, like an owl dragged out into the
tormenting light of day. I approached him with
stateliness and distance, to convince bystanders
that he was nothing more to me than a servant.

"Lord love you, Miss Bessie, it can't be
you!" he exclaimed, instantly reviving from
sixty to thirty years of age, "the master
himself'll not know you again. If you wouldn't
be above it, miss, when we're out of sight, I
should like to shake hands with you for this
once; if it's not too great a liberty. You gave
old Pim a kiss when you went away."

"Oh, Pim! dear old Pim!" I cried, seizing
his big hand, covered with a very worn pair of
my father's gloves. All the dignity of the
Clergy Daughters' School vanished as if it had
never been. "I love you just the same, Pim;
and I'm coming to live at home again, you
know, so we shall have the old times back."

Pim aged into sixty again in a moment, and
shook his bended head feebly; halting and
flagging as if unable to keep up with my young,
impatient step, as he walked a few paces
behind me. When I tried to question him about
home, he replied reluctantly. Once even he
produced a Jew's-harp, and began to twang a
doleful tune upon it, as he had been used to do
when, as a child, I had asked him unanswerable
questions; but, recollecting himself, he replaced
it in his pocket with a despondent apology, and
we walked on without further conversation.

Our home was an old rambling mansion
attached to the Elizabethan Grammar School, of
which my father had been master for thirty
years. The endowment was fifty pounds a year,
and the scholars on the foundation were only
twelve in number; but, under former masters,
the school had won something more than mere
local reputation, and one after another had
retired, either in possession of a comfortable
competency, or with the presentation to a
church-living. College Hill, where the
school was situated, was one of the oldest
and narrowest streets in Tarnford, and no
thoroughfare of business; the buildings
consisting chiefly of a row of decaying houses,
property in Chancery, and a large, enclosed
quadrangle, entered by an archway opposite the
school-house, and surrounded by almshouses for
twenty-five aged men. The character of the
street depended altogether upon the condition
of the school. No surer index was needed than
its aspect at noon and evening when the scholars
dispersed; if Tamford Grammar School was
prospering, the walls echoed to the shrill whoop
of schoolboys, and the pavements rang with
their clattering footsteps, followed by the
wrathful maledictions of the almsmen. But
not a sound was to be heard as we entered it,
save the lagging step of a foundationer, who
slunk close to the wall, with a sly, insolent,
sidelong glance at me, as we passed him. In
the dark shadow of the porch, which stretched
across the narrow causeway, I saw Felicia watching
for me. The pale beams of the wintry sun
glistened through the lattice casement of the
projecting window of the study over the porch,
upon my father's snow-white head, which was
bowed weariedly upon his hands. Neither of
them moved as I appeared, but Felicia's
beautiful, sad face kindled into a sudden glow, which
faded before I had run quickly across the little
space between us. When I threw my arms
round her neck, she bent her lofty head to mine,
and kissed me coldly, without a word of welcome.

We passed on into a bare and empty lobby,
across which she led me to our old parlour, so
often pictured and repainted by my imagination,
that it had become a very pleasant place; not
grand or gorgeous, for Felicia had hinted gently
in her letters at a blight of poverty fallen upon
us, but at least a tasteful, simple, home-like
sitting-room. The paper was discoloured with