hour-glass, and flies back, much faster than
he ever flew forward.

New Year's Day. What Party can that
have been, and what New Year's Day can
that have been, which first rooted the phrase,
"A New Year's Day Party," in my mind?
So far back do my recollections of childhood
extend, that I have a vivid remembrance of
the sensation of being carried down-stairs in
a woman's arms, and holding tight to her, in
the terror of seeing the steep perspective
below. Hence, I may have been carried into
this Party, for anything I know; but, somehow
or other, I most certainly got there, and
was in a doorway looking on; and in that
look a New Year's Party revealed itself to
me, as a very long row of ladies and gentlemen
sitting against a wall, all drinking at
once out of little glass cups with handles,
like custard-cups. What can this Party have
been! I am afraid it must have been a dull
one, but I know it came off. Where can
this Party have been! I have not the
faintest notion where, but I am absolutely
certain it was somewhere. Why the
company should all have been drinking at once,
and especially why they should all have been
drinking out of custard-cups, are points of
fact over which the Waters of Oblivion have
long rolled. I doubt if they can have been
drinking the Old Year out and the New One
in, because they were not at supper and had
no table before them. There was no speechmaking,
no quick movement and change of
action, no demonstration of any kind. They
were all sitting in a long row against the
wall—very like my first idea of the good
people in Heaven, as I derived it from a
wretched picture in a Prayer-book—and they
had all got their heads a little thrown back,
and were all drinking at once. It is possible
enough that I, the baby, may have been
caught up out of bed to have a peep at the
company, and that the company may happen
to have been thus occupied for the flash and
space of a moment only. But, it has always
seemed to me as if I looked at them for a
long time—hours—during which they did
nothing else; and to this present time, a
casual mention in my hearing, of a Party on
a New Years Day, always revives that
picture.

On what other early New Year's Day can
I possibly have been an innocent accomplice
in the secreting—in a coal cellar too—of a
man with a wooden leg! There was no man
with a wooden leg, in the circle of my
acknowledged and lawful relations and friends.
Yet, I clearly remember that we stealthily
conducted the man with the wooden leg—
whom we knew intimately—into the coal
cellar, and that, in getting him over the coals
to hide him behind some partition there was
beyond, his wooden leg bored itself in among
the small coals, and his hat flew off, and he
fell backward and lay prone: a spectacle of
helplessness. I clearly remember that his
struggles to get up among the small coals, and
to obtain any purchase on himself in those
slippery and shifting circumstances, were a
work of exceeding difficulty, involving delay
and noise that occasioned us excessive terror.
I have not the least idea who "we" were,
except that I had a little sister for another
innocent accomplice, and that there must have
been a servant girl for principal: neither do
I know whether the man with the wooden
leg robbed the house, before or afterwards, or
otherwise nefariously distinguished himself.
Nor, how a cat came to be connected with the
occasion, and had a fit, and ran over the top of
a door. But, I know that some awful reason
compelled us to hush it all up, and that we
"never told." For many years, I had this
association with a New Year's Day entirely to
myself, until at last, the anniversary being come
round again, I said to the little sister, as she
and I sat by chance among our children,
"Do you remember the New Year's Day
of the man with the wooden leg?" Whereupon,
a thick black curtain which had overhung
him from her infancy, went up, and she
saw just this much of the man, and not a jot
more. (A day or so before her death, that
little sister told me that, in the night, the
smell of the fallen leaves in the woods where
we had habitually walked as very young
children, had come upon her with such
strength of reality that she had moved her
weak head to look for strewn leaves on the
floor at her bedside.)

New Year's Day. It was on a New Year's
Day that I fought a duel. Furious with
love and jealousy, I "went out " with another
gentleman of honor, to assert my passion for
the loveliest and falsest of her sex. I estimate
the age of that young lady to have
been about nine—my own age, about ten. I
knew the Queen of my soul, as "the
youngest Miss Clickitt but one." I had
offered marriage, and my proposals had been
very favorably received, though not definitively
closed with. At which juncture, my
enemy—Paynter, by name—arose out of
some abyss or cavern, and came between us.
The appearance of the Fiend Paynter, in
the Clickitt Paradise, was altogether so
mysterious and sudden, that I don't know where
he came from; I only know that I found
him, on the surface of this earth, one afternoon
late in the month of December, playing
at hot boiled beans and butter with the
youngest Miss Clickitt but one. His conduct
on that occasion was such, that I sent a
friend to Paynter. After endeavouring with
levity to evade the question, by pulling the
friend's cap off and throwing it into a cabbage-
garden, Paynter referred my messenger to
his cousin—a goggle-eyed Being worthy of
himself. Preliminaries were arranged, and by
my own express stipulation the meeting was
appointed for New Year's Day, in order that
one of us might quit this state of existence
on a day of mark. I passed a considerable