ble your country bumpkin loves a conun- groom. How beautiful she looked in her neat drum, and laughs heartiest at what he does and delicate dress, her blushes and her smiles! not understand; besides these professional | The young ladies of the vicarage, with whose qualifications, Thomas was eminently obliging family she had lived from childhood, went to and tolerably handy; offered his assistance in church with her, and every body cried as usual every emergency, and did more good, and less on such occasions. Clara, who had never harm than most amateur helpers, who, gene- been at a wedding before, had resolved against rally speaking, are the greatest hindrances un- crying; but tears are contagious things, and der the sun. Thomas was really useful. To poor Clara's flowed, she did not well know be sure, when engaged in aiding Mary, a few why. This too was afterwards thought an ill casualties did occur from pre-occupation; once, omen. for instance, they contrived to let down a whole line of clothes which he had been assisting to hang out. Neither party could imagine how the accident happened, but the washing was forced to be done over again. Another time, they, between them, overset the milkbucket, and the very same day so over-heated the oven, that a whole batch of bread, and three apple-pies were scorched to a cinder. But Thomas was more fortunate with other coadjutors. He planted a whole patch of cabbages in a manner perfectly satisfactory, and even made a very decent cucumber-bed in mine host's garden. He churned Mrs. Jones's butter as well as Mary herself could have done it. He shaped bats, and cut wickets for the great boys, plaited wicker baskets for the younger ones, and even dug a grave for the sextoness, an old woman of eighty, the widow of a former sexton who held that office (corruptly, as our village radicals were wont to say) in conjunction with that of the pew-opener, and used to keep the children in order by one nod of her grey head, and to compound for the vicar every Sunday a nosegay of the choicest flowers of the season. Thomas, although not very fond of the job, dug a grave, to save sixpence for poor Alice. Afterwards this kindness was thought ominous.

No wonder that our seaman was popular. The only time he got into a scrape at Aberleigh, was with two itinerant showmen, who called themselves sailors, but who were, Thomas was sure, "nothing but land-lubbers," and who were driving about an unhappy porpoise in a wheelbarrow, and showing it at two-pence a head, under the name of a sea pig. Thomas had compassion on the creature of his own element, who was kept half alive by constant watering, and threatened to fight both the fellows unless they promised to drive it instantly back to the sea; which promise was made and broken, as he might have expected, if a breach of promise could ever enter into a sailor's conception. Our sailor was too frank even to maintain his Mary's maidenly artifice, and had so many confidants, that before Mr. Mansfield published the banns of marriage between Thomas Clere and Mary Howell, all the parish knew that they were lovers.

At last the wedding-day came. Aaron Keep left his work to take a peep at the bride, and Ben Appleton paid her the high compliment of playing no trick either on her or the bride

Thomas and Mary had hired a room for a week in a neighbouring town, after which she was to return for a while to her good master and mistress; and he was to go to sea again in the good merchant-ship, the Fair Star. To go to sea again for one last voyage, and then to return rich, quite rich for their simple wishes, (Thomas's savings already yielded an income of twelve shillings a week) set up in some little trade, and live together all the rest of their lives-such were their humble plans. They found their short honeymoon, passed in a strange place, and in idleness, a little long, I fancy, in spite of true love, as greater people have done before them. Yet Mary would willingly have remained even under the sad penalty of want of occupation, rather than part with Thomas for the sea, which now first began to appear formidable in her eyes. But Thomas had promised, and must go on this one last voyage to Canada; he should be home in six months, six months would be soon gone, and then they would never part again. And so he soothed, and comforted, and finally brought her back to the vicarage, and left her there; and she, when the trial came, behaved as well as possible. Her eyes were red, to be sure, for a week or two, and she would turn pale when praying for "those who travel by land or by water," but still she was calm, and cheerful, and apparently happy.

An accident about six weeks after their separation, first disturbed her tranquillity. She contrived, in cutting a stick to tie up a tree carnation belonging to her dear Miss Clara, to lacerate very considerably the third finger of her left hand. The injury was so serious, the surgeon insisted on the necessity of sawing off the ring, the wedding-ring! She refused. The hurt grew worse and worse. Still Mary continued obstinate, in spite of Mrs. Mansfield's urgent remonstrances; at length it came to the point of sawing off the ring or the finger, and then, and not till then, not till Mr. Mansfield had called to aid all the authority of a master, did she submit-evidently with more reluctance and more pain than she would have felt at an amputation. The finger got well, and her kind mistress gave her her own mother's wedding-ring to supply the place of the severed one, but it would not do; a superstitious feeling had seized her, a strange vague remorse; she spoke of her compliance as sinful; as if by divesting herself of the

and bent, and squalid, like one who comes Hitherto these expectations had been disapfrom a devouring shipwreck or a long cap-pointed. Halls, places, houses, granges, tivity, who but Mary could have recognised lodges, parks, and courts out of number, we Thomas Clere? Her heart knew him on the had visited; but neither in the north nor in instant, and with a piercing cry of joy and thankfulness, she rushed into his arms. The cry alarmed the whole family. They hastened to share the joy and the surprise, and to relieve poor Thomas of his fainting burden. Both had sunk together on the snowy ground; and when loosened from his long embrace, the happy wife was dead!—the shock of joy had been fatal!

queue behind. His talk was very like his ed to have the best of the battle. Then folperson, long and thin; prosing most unmerci- lowed her sister, the lady Caroline, an intellifully about the American war, and telling in- gent-looking young woman, and no musician terminable zig-zag stories, which set compre--but alack! the fair damsel was in love, and hension at defiance. For the rest, he was an on the very point of marriage. Her lover excellent person, kind to his family and civil Lord B. (who may as well fall into this divito his guests; he never failed to take wine sion, since he was domesticated in the house with lady C. at dinner, and regularly every and already considered as a son,) was also morning made me in the very same words a pleasant-looking,-but then he was in love too. flourishing compliment on my rosy cheeks. Of course this couple, although doubtless very good company for each other, went for nothing with the rest of the party, of whose presence indeed they, to do them justice, seemed generally most comfortably unconscious.

Next in order came the countess, tall, and lean like her husband, and (allowing for difference of sex and complexion, his skin resembling brickdust in colour, and hers being of the sort of paleness usually called sallow,) Next came the appendages to a great house, not unlike him in countenance. In their the usual official residents. First appeared minds and manners there was also a similari- Mr. M. the family chaplain, a great mathematy, yet not without some difference. Dulness tician, whose very eyes seemed turned inward in him showed itself in dead speech, in her as if contemplating the figures on his brain. in dead silence. Stiff and cold as a poker Never was man so absent since the one dewas my lady. Her fixed, settled, unsmiling scribed by La Bruyere. He once came down silence hung over the banquet like a cloud, to dinner with the wrong side of his waistcoat chilling and darkening all about her. Yet outward; and, though he complained of the they say she was warm-hearted, and (which difficulty of buttoning it, could not discover would seem extraordinary if we did not fre- the reason; and he has been known more than quently meet with instances of the same ap-once to walk about all the morning, and even parent contradiction) was famous for episto- to mount the pulpit, with one white leg and lary composition, dealt out words in writing with astonishing fluency and liberality, and was celebrated far and near for that most intolerable waste of paper which is commonly known by the name of a sensible letter.

Then came the goodly offspring of this noble couple, that is to say, the three youngest; for the elder branches of this illustrious house were married and settled in distant homes. The honourable Frederic G., the only son who remained in the paternal mansion, was a diplomatist in embryo, a rising young man. His company they were not likely to enjoy long, since he was understood to be in training for the secretaryship to a foreign embassy. He had recently come into parliament for a neighbouring borough, and his maiden speech (I wonder who wrote it!) had created a prodigious sensation in the family circle. On the glory of that oration, the echo of his fame, he lived then, and has lived (as far as I know) ever since. I can only say that I never heard him utter more than a monosyllable at a time during the ten days that we breakfasted, dined, and supped in company-ineffable coxcomb! and I have not heard of his speaking in the house of commons from that time to this. There he sits, single-speech G. Of his elder sister, the lady Matilda, I can say no more than that she was reckoned one of the finest harp-players in England-a musical automaton, who put forth notes instead of words, and passed her days in alternate practisings for the purpose of subsequent exhibition (which fatiguing exercise was of course a continual and provoking struggle with a host of stringed difficulties), and in the exhibitions themselves, in which also to my ears the difficulties seem

one black (like the discrepant eyes of my friend the Talking Gentleman), in consequence of having forgotten to draw a silk stocking over his gauze one. He seldom knew the day of the month, often read a wrong lesson, and was pretty sure to forget his sermon; otherwise a most kind and excellent creature, whom for very pity nobody could think of disturbing when he appeared immersed in calculation, which was always. Secondly came Miss R., some time governess and present companion; what a misnomer! the errantest piece of still life I ever encountered, pale, freckled, redhaired, and all over small. Thirdly entered Dr. S., the family physician, a stern oracular man, with a big wig and a tremendous frown. Two red-faced gentlemen, des vieux militaires, who drank my lord's wine and listened to his stories, completed this amusing assembly.

There was another person who never appeared at the dining-table, but whose presence, during the two or three hours that she spent in the saloon in the morning, and about the same time which she passed in the drawingroom after dinner, distressed and annoyed me more than all the party put together. This was the honourable Mrs. G., the earl's mother, (the title had descended to him from an uncle) a lady in her ninety-second year, and sufficiently vigorous to justify the expectation that she might live to see a hundred. She was a tall, spare, tough-looking woman, with a long bony face, dim staring eyes, and an aspect altogether corpse-like and unearthly. Her dress was invariably of black silk with a very long waist, a point-lace kerchief, or rather tippet, and a very small short rounded apron of the same costly material. On her head she wore

a lace cap and lappets surmounted with a sort of shepherdess hat of black silk, fastened on with two enormous pins with silver tops. This dress which, in gay colours and on a young and handsome woman, would have been very pretty, only served to make Mrs. G. appear more ghastly, more like a faded picture which had stepped out of its frame. She was a perpetual memento mori; a skull and cross-bones would hardly have been more efficacious in mortifying the vanity of youth. This, however, I could have endured: it was an evil in common; but the good lady had experienced the partial loss of faculty and memory so frequent at her advanced age, and, having unfortunately mistaken me for her great grand-child, the eldest daughter of Lord G.'s eldest son, she could by no means be turned aside from the notion which had so unaccountably seized her imagination, and treated me exactly as a doting, scolding great-grandmamma would be likely to treat her unlucky descendant, -a process which so thoroughly disconcerted me, a shy shamefaced girl, that, after I had undergone about six hours of hugging and lecturing from my pretended ancestress, I was fain to keep my room to avoid her intolerable persecution. In this dilemma the countess suddenly proposed to turn me over to Marianne; and a young lady about my own age, whom I had not before seen, made her appearance. Oh what a difference between her and the other inhabitants of the castle! What a lovely airy creature it was!

"A dancing shape, an image gay,

To haunt and startle and waylay;"

light and bounding as a fawn, with a wild fanciful beauty in her bright black eyes, in the play of her features, and the brilliancy of her dark yet glowing complexion! A charming creature in mind and in person, was Miss Marianne,—for by that name alone she was introduced to me, almost equally charming in the high spirits whose elasticity harmonized with her animated beauty, or in the tender and pensive melancholy which so often checkered her gayer mood.

vealed in three words, since that amounted to nothing more than her having lived ever since she could recollect at G. Castle, sometimes in the nursery and the library, sometimes in the housekeeper's room, kindly treated by all, and taught by fits and snatches as she came in their way: so that her education, partly conducted by the young lady's governess, partly by the young gentleman's tutor, and sometimes even by Lady G.'s maid, bore a very strong resemblance to that ingenious exercise of female patience called patch-work, where you meet with bits of every thing and nothing complete. The two most extraordinary cir cumstances were her want of a surname (for she had never been called by any other appellation than Marianne) and the sedulous care with which, although living in the same house, she had been concealed from my soi-disante great-grandmother Mrs. G. The loss of faculty which occasioned that mistake was of recent occurrence, as the venerable lady had till within a few months been remarkable for the accuracy and clearness of her perceptions; and Marianne related fifty stories to prove the care with which her very existence was guarded from Mrs. G.'s knowledge, the manner in which she had been crammed into closets, stowed under sofas, smuggled behind screens, or folded into window-curtains, at the first tap of the old lady's Italian heel, and the menaces which were thrown out against the servants, if any should presume to name her in Mrs. G.'s presence. One unlucky footman had actually been discharged on the spot, for want of invention and presence of mind and fluency of lying: when questioned as to the arranger of the flowers in their vases (an art in which she excelled,) he stammered, and looked as if going to say Miss Marianne; for which piece of intended truth (an uncommon fault in a London footman!) the poor lacquey was dismissed.

Now if either of us had possessed the slightest knowledge of the world, these circumstances would hardly have failed to suggest Marianne's true origin. We should immediately have conjectured her to be the illegitimate offspring of some near connection We became almost immediately intimate of the family;-in fact she was the daughter happy privilege of youthful companionship!- of Lord G.'s second and favourite son, long and had speedily told each other our whole since deceased, by a beautiful Italian singer histories, as two young ladies meeting in an who died in childbed of poor Marianne; but old castle ought to do. My story, I am sorry this was the last conjecture that would have to say, was very little worthy of such a situa- entered either of our silly heads.-I, indeed, tion and opportunity for display. Nothing not yet seventeen, and carefully brought up, could be less romantic than the ease and com- had hardly heard that such things were, and fort and indulgence in which my life had Marianne, although older and less guarded hitherto passed, nothing less adapted to a he- from the knowledge of fashionable wickedroine than the secure and affluent middle sta- ness, had, when left to choose her own stution in which my happy lot then seemed to be dies, read too many novels, in which the hefixed. My tale was told in two or three brief roines emerged from similar obscurity to high sentences. The history of my fair companion rank and brilliant fortune, not to have conwas not so quickly dispatched. What she structed a romance on that model for her own knew of herself might indeed have been re-benefit. Indeed she had two, in one of which