"Can you doubt it, Mr. Herbert ?' I replied -and so the affair ended; before the end of the quadrille, I had referred him to mamma; he called the next day (you can't think how my heart beat), but it all went off very smoothly, everything is settled, and we are to be married almost directly. But the most comical part of the affair is, that Frank declares he began the conversation in pure fun, and had not the remotest idea I should take him at his word. Yet, after all, depend upon it, we shall be quite as happy as though we had gone on sighing and languishing through a whole season, varying the pastime with little interludes of coquetry on my part, and heroics on his; of stormy partings, and reconciliatory meetings. I hate your never-ending, still beginning,' Durandartelike courtships. I am always for things done offhand."

Having thus frankly discussed her future prospects, Miss Page took her leave; but notwithstanding these confident anticipations of felicity, hers was, I believe, anything but a happy union. After a brief career of profuse extravagance and thoughtless dissipation, Mrs. Frank Herbert threw herself out of the pale of society. What became of her afterwards I never knew. Poor thing! her faults were rather those of the head than the heart. She was forsaken, ere she in her turn forsook.

AMPLY did Viola redeem the promise she had once made me, for she yielded not supinely to her grief, but strove, with all the energy of her powerful mind, to rouse herself to action. Far from indulging in vain regrets, she shunned the solitude that had once been dear to her. Diligently, too, did she apply herself to the study of fresh sciences; and if for one moment the book were suffered to fall from her hands in listless reverie, a word, a look from me, would recall her wandering thoughts, and she would apply herself anew to the task, as though her very being depended on her assiduity. But the hope that once gladdened existence had fled; her character had lost. its peculiar tone; the tension of her spirits had been too great, they never recovered their elasticity.

When standing on the brink of some fearful chasm, the dread result of a convulsion of nature, with the rocks beneath me scathed by the lightning, or riven

by the whirlwind, although I may be awestruck, yet do I not feel the aching pity with which I gaze on the lowly friable stone, wearing away beneath the ceaseless dropping of the waters, as they fall on it with "tinkling plash," surely, yet slowly, performing their work of desolation. And as in the natural, so in the moral world; it is not the appalling calamity, which, at one rude blow, crushes its victim to the earth, that excites my deepest sympathy; for I know full well that the very magnitude of the grief stuns us for the time,that its intensity produces a mental numbness, when the first overwhelming shock is past; but rather the daily, hourly care, the petty martyrdoms, which are never blazoned to the world, the necessity of mingling with those, whose every word and action jars painfully with our keener sensibilities, the hollow task of veiling the aching heart with the smiling lip; -these are the trials that wring my very soul to contemplate, and these had Viola now to endure in heartsilence, and in heart-sorrow; for to whom might she confide her griefs? She remembered her father's warning words, "Beware of its ever being forced upon me;" and from her mother it would have been vain to expect that degree of healthy sympathy which ever lightens, even if it may not remove, the burden of sorrow. Mrs. Sidney (with the best intentions in the world) would have blamed, lectured, wearied herself and all around her, with fruitless lamentations, and finally have applied to her husband for counsel and assistance.

Oh, it is not the matrimonial engagement, though it be protracted from year to year, and adverse fate forbid the union,-it is not when approving friends sanction the prolonged courtship, and delay weakens not the attachment, that an engagement is a thing difficult to endure. If of the patriarch it might be said, that those seven years' servitude "seemed unto him but as a few days," for the love he bore the Syrian

maid, surely to one of that sex, whose earliest tutelage is submission to events, and patience under disappointment,-whose very existence is one of prospective rather than of present bliss,-the period in question is a season of felicity, far more than of probation. Indeed, it may be fairly mooted, whether the days of courtship are not the fairest and brightest in a woman's existence. How unbounded is then her sway! A mimic queen, she reigns, and, monarch-like, she can do no wrong; her wishes are anticipated, her wildest caprices regarded as fascinations; homage and devotion track her steps; she lives in an ideal world; her path, for one brief while, is strewn with flowers.

But with Viola Sidney it was not so; for her there remained only the lingering hope, the dire uncertainty, the fell suspicion, and the busy rumour; the disconnected phrase that fears to wound, the gentle innuendo couching an hundred meanings in the one, the halfbreathed word of consolation, that more than all does leave its rankling sting behind. No marvel that her beauty faded, and her spirits sunk beneath the trial.

In Viola I had long centred all my hopes, and with her blighted prospects my interest in life seemed to have fled. I now endeavoured to occupy myself solely with my younger cousins, but in vain; I looked on them with a feeling akin to that with which old Priam is represented as regarding his many stalwart sons, when the gods had reft him of Hector. Still, as time revolved, and, one by one, they entered on the busy stage of life, I could not but sympathise with their failure, or success, although very different was the feeling to that absorbing and engrossing interest with which I was wont to regard her who seemed to me as a second self.

James Sidney, having pursued his commercial studies to his father's entire satisfaction, was now (after three years' residence on the continent) summoned home, and forthwith assigned his department in the counting

house. Assiduous in his duties, indefatigable in his exertions, skilled in all the technicalities of his vocation, James soon rose into high favour with the heads of the establishment; so much so, that after undergoing a due noviciate, he was enrolled a member of the firm; and it was soon acknowledged, on all hands, that the house had benefited greatly by the ability and intelligence of its junior partner.

Not the certainty that his son would one day rise to the highest honours of the state, could have delighted Mr. Sidney half so much as did this earnest of his future eminence in the mercantile world. He now confidently looked forward to a period when the house of "Brookes, Sidney, and Co." should become one of the most distinguished in the City: it was true he might not live to witness so happy a result, but the certainty of its being effected, and that, too, through his son's intervention, gratified Mr. Sidney's feelings, both as a parent and a merchant. It was, I believe, the first time my unimaginative cousin had ever indulged in that pleasant, yet delusive reverie, entitled a daydream.

There was, however, one point on which the father and son differed materially. Mr. Sidney was prudent and cautious, to the verge of timidity, whilst James was rash and speculative, to a fault. The petty, yet sure and honourable gains in which his father delighted, were to the youth an abomination. He was,

in heart, a gambler, and longed to clear the board at "one fell swoop;" but this propensity, for a while, lay dormant. Checked and controlled as he was by the higher powers, young Sidney had neither temptation nor opportunity for its development.

In precisely the same ratio that James gratified his father's expectations, Dick disappointed them. He had left Mr. Strickland's in disgrace, and had been subsequently sent to a public school, where having involved himself in some exploits, rather more hazard