ENHANCED ENJOYMENTS. 411 



to which, they in their conspicuous clothing are the more ex- 

 posed. Thus has it been with our maturity. By the clouding 

 of our early prospects our youthful buoyancy was depressed, 

 our youthful brightness shorn of its gayest hues ; yet to those 

 influences which appeared so adverse, owed we not escape from 

 majiy of life's early perils ? and now, owe we not the enjoy- 

 ment of many a calm pleasure, vivified by the very privations 

 which might have seemed to "kill them ? If none like the 

 Spitalfields weaver knows the delight of insect-collecting, none 

 like the city clerk can tell the delight of insect observation 

 caught by snatches upon summer holidays. Such, for many 

 a year, was ours ; and now that our working-day of life is 

 over, right pleasam have we found it to take our evening 

 flight away for ever from its weary scenes, and to indulge 

 without restraint in the manifold pleasures of our loved pur- 

 suit. Joyous to the bee and butterfly the exercise of their 

 wings and senses amidst the sweets which fill the atmosphere 

 they always live in ; but yet more joyous to our prototype, 

 the Cricket, must be a flight like his, when he exchanges 

 for summer air and sunshine the contracted pleasures of 

 house and hearth ; and of this description is our enjoyment 

 now. And then the correspondent boon boon above a 

 cricket's need or cricket's ken our escape also from a moral 

 atmosphere, hot, glaring, and heart-oppressive, sickly with 

 the incense offered to Mammon by his servile worshippers, 

 to an air, not, alas ! of heavenly purity, but in which the 



