AUNT PATTY AND AUNT EDITH.

“COME, Charles, and join me in a stroll this fine evening," said George Douglas, a young minister, to his friend, who was lounging sulkily over the gate that opened to his mother's pretty grounds.

"That I will, and gladly too," answered young Brunton, springing to his side, and sinking his voice almost to a whisper; “for if ever a poor fellow was bored at home, I am; I have been this last half-hour studying an excuse to get away."

"You bored at home, Charles? How can that be? Willow Cottage, as your Aunt Patty calls it, is the very model of the cottage of content; and never did it look more sweetly than now, with its honey-suckles all in bloom, the yellow jessamine scenting the air, and the hanging bird whistling its short clear notes from the waving bough. A better mother you could not have; and your sister Mary-how I should envy her brother, if I did not hope to win a yet dearer title!"

"Yes, yes," impatiently exclaimed Brunton, "the cottage is very well, and I can never be thankful enough for such a mother and such a sister; but Aunt Patty, or Cousin Martha, as she insists upon our calling her since Mary and I have grown up, is the constant plague of my life; and what is worse, I dare not show my vexation, because mother always treats her

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with such affectionate respect. You know she is not my aunt, but my father's cousin, brought up an orphan in his father's house; and when my mother became a widow, they joined their little means, and lived together; and now, since uncle Henry's property has come to us, mother insists upon her still making our home hers. To be sure, I ought to be grateful for her kindness in the time of trouble; but no favours can give any one a right to worry us, as she does, with her old maid's whims."

"We all have our peculiarities, Charles," interrupted Douglas, 66 as we should always remember; 'bear and forbear,' is a homely but useful rule, and the true secret of being happy with each other."

"Bear I must, indeed; but you cannot know how hard it is to do so. She puts on her best smiles when you come to see us, because you have so many kind words for her, and are only with us for an hour or two at a time. You must live with her, in the same house, to know her. There we must wait for her every morning, until she has smoothed her brown wig, as if she were setting it at a prince; and when she has sailed into the breakfast-room, nothing is right: the eggs are too hard or too soft, the coffee too strong, or the tea too weak; the bread too heavy, or the butter not fresh enough; and so she goes on complaining of things in general, and her dyspepsia in particular; yet eating all the while with a ploughman's appetite, though she destroys ours with her talk about digestion, and such pretty words as your dyspeptics love to grace the table with. What right have people to do all this? So she begins the day, and so she carries it

through. If I leave my newspaper, or my book, laid open on the table for a moment, she catches them up, and puts them out of sight, and I am lectured, on my return, for littering the room. If I read to myself, she exclaims at the rudeness of young men now-a-days ;' and if I read aloud, she is sure to go creaking about, hunting for her scissors or cotton, at the most interesting passage. Poor Mary and I cannot sing together, but she interrupts us, wondering how we can like such Italian stuff, and volunteers a part in Together let us range the fields,' or some antiquated ditty; a look from mother makes us yield, and she goes on quavering away like a pea-hen, scorning all time and tune, and laying the blame of her failure on sister's accompaniment. We cannot make up a party of young persons for a ride or a ramble, but she must be asked; and then mars all our pleasure by screaming at some peaceful cow; refusing to cross a meadow for fear of wetting her feet, or to enter a wood, lest she should tread on a snake. She made us sell the best carriage-horses we ever had, because they cocked their ears at a drum; and my faithful Carlo is now whining himself to a skeleton in the stable, where she has had him chained, for having, in a moment of unusual daring, run off with her glove. She calls Mary's frankness unfeminine boldness; and would make her as great a prude as herself, warning her all the time against young men, from whom, I am sure, she was never in danger. She is far older than my mother, yet affects to rank with the young; and instead of winning attentions, is always exacting them, which is the surest way of losing them altogether. But it is always so with old maids; they