arranged for Mr. Wyndham's two sons to sojourn with this learned pedagogue one year, dinner was announced, and in came the schoolmaster's three daughters, who were overpoweringly beautiful. The eldest, Matilda, was perhaps sixteen, and her innumerable auburn ringlets, her blushing transparent magnificent complexion, her dark hazel eye, her perfect features, and recherche little hand and foot, her fascinating naivete of manners, just budding into womanhood, quivered so many unaccountable emotions in Mr. Wyndham's heart, that the morning's dawn still found him sentimentalizing on the charming little woodland girl.

"Wreathed in its dark brown rings, her hair

Half hid Matilda's forehead fair,

Half hid and half reveal'd to view,
Her full dark eye of hazel hue.

The rose, with faint and feeble streak,
So slightly tinged the maiden's cheek,
That you had said her hue was pale;
But if she faced the summer's gale,
Or spoke, or sung, or quicker moved,
Or heard the praise of those she loved,
Or when of interest was express'd
Aught that waked feeling in her breast,
The mantling blood in ready play
Rivall'd the blush of rising day.
There was a soft, a pensive grace,
A cast of thought upon her face
That suited well the forehead high,
The eyelash dark, and downcast eye.
In hours of sport, that mood gave way
To Fancy's light and frolic play;
And when the dance, or tale, or song,
In harmless mirth sped time along,
Full oft her doting sire would call
His Maud the merriest of them all."

Poor Mr. Wyndham was caught in a cul-de-sac, and it was a bootless task to remember how brief a period had elapsed since his wife had been laid in the grave. He was compelled, the more he examined his heart, to confess that it was convalescing from its grief of the exodus to the other world, of the dignified mother of his children.

"All love may be expell'd by other love,

As poisons are by poisons.'

Certain it is, however, that Mr. Wyndham lingered around that neighborhood for four mortal weeks, and as he played most sweetly on the guitar and flute, and little Miss M'Elroy did not know that his wife was not yet cold in her grave, he managed his own handsomeness so adroitly, that, at the end of a month, he had inflicted on her ruby pouting lips any number of the most romantic kisses, and on her hand the diamond engagement-ring- and all this in spite of her having an old bachelor millionaire beau, whose shoneau had been the blissful dream, day and night, of her moneyadoring papa and mamma.

"The poets judged like the philosophers when they feigned love to be blind; how often do we see in a woman what our judgment and taste approve, and yet feel nothing toward her; how often what they both condemn, and yet feel a great deal!"

Old Mr. M'Elroy remarked to his wife—

"He says he loves my daughter.

I think so too; for never gazed the moon
Upon the water, as he'll stand and read,

As 'twere, my daughter's eyes; and, to be plain,
I think there is not half a kiss to choose
Who loves the other best."

Hume says, in his Essays, "That there is nothing in itself beautiful or deformed, desirable or hateful; but these attributes arise from the peculiar constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection."

The Countess of Landsfeld remarks, in her Lecture on Beautiful Women, "Canova was obliged to have sixty different women sit for his Venus, and how shall we dare point to any one woman and say she is beautiful? When Zeuxis drew his famous picture of Helen, he modelled his portrait from the separate charms of five different virgins."

"But though there is this difficulty in settling upon a perfect standard of female beauty, there can be no doubt about its power over the customs and institutions of mankind." "The beauty of woman has settled and unsettled the affairs of empires and the fate of republies, when diplomacy and the sword have proved futile." "Certainly," observes Lucian, "more women have obtained honor for their beauty than all other virtues besides;" and Tasso has said, that "beauty and grace are the power and arms of a woman;" while Ariosto declares, that "after every other gift of arms had been exhausted on man, there remained for woman only beauty the most victorious of the whole."

"There is a great and terrible testimony of the power of female beauty in the history which Homer gives us of Helen: when she shows herself on the ramparts of Troy, even the aged Priam forgets his miseries and the wrongs of his people in rapture at her charms."

“And afterwards when Menelaus came, armed with rage and fury to revenge himself on the lovely but

guilty cause of so much bloodshed, his weapon fell in her presence, and his arm grew nerveless."

"Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,

And beauty draws us by a single hair."

"But where are we to detect this especial source of power? Often, forsooth, in a dimple, sometimes beneath the shade of an eyelid, or perhaps among the tresses of a little fantastic curl!"

"For what admir'st thou? What transports thee so?
An outside? Fair, no doubt, and worthy well

Thy cherishing, thy honoring, and thy love

Not thy subjection."

"But did not Adam the very first man

The very first woman obey?

And we'll manage it so that the very last man
Shall the very last woman obey."

No gentleman, except an old widower, could sympathize in the parting scene between the little teenish beauty and her adorer, who was twenty years her

senior.

Old Jehu, the coachman, had so many times harnessed up his horses to return home to Palmetto Grove, and then had the order countermanded, that it was not long before he guessed what was the cause of his master's capriciousness, and felt offended that his blessed old mistress, just laid in her grave, should be so soon forgotten. (All old family negroes feel this very much, and rarely, if ever, become reconciled to a second marriage if there are orphan children. Indeed, in the South nothing is more potent in a child's

mind than the prejudice its black nurse instils against a step-mother.)

Business on the plantation, however, had all been neglected for a whole month, or at least the inductive. part of it; so now Mr. Wyndham must tear his passionate heart away, saying to himself

'I leave myself, my friends, and all, for love.
Thou, thou hast metamorphosed me;

Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,

War with good counsel, set the world at nought;

Made wit with musing weak; heart-sick with thought."

Old Mr. and Mrs. M'Elroy were in ecstasies; for they had not been able to force their daughter to marry the ugly, deformed old millionaire that had sued for her hand, some time previous to the meeting with the handsome widower, Wyndham. Besides old Quackenbush (for that was his jaw-breaking name) could not boast of aristocratic blood or societarian refinement of manners, such as Wyndham possessed; so that they felt anxious to marry their daughter to her new, rich, aristocratic lover on the spot, rather than trust the vicissitudes, if not the constancy, of the twain, to be now separated several months by a hundred miles. Respect to the friends of his dead wife compelled a postponement of the marriage at least six months; though her parents could not comprehend the common sense or delicacy of the delay; for, said they —

"The course of true love never did run smooth;

But, either it was different in blood,

Or else misgraffed in respect of years,

Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,