I knew it to my cost. It is the most onerous and the least profitable post a poor gentleman can fill. A family lawyer or a family physician may pick up something in his vocation, but a family rhymster has about as much by his office as he who accepts the Chiltern Hundreds or the Escheatorship of Munster. And then his toil is never-ending. Not a Slingsby has given up the ghost since I was able to hold a pen but I have written his or her epitaph; not a babe has been born unto us but I have felicitated his parents and now to fail at a marriage! The thing was not to be thought of; and accordingly I had my song "cut and dry." At a significant nod from Jack Bishop, three others took their places beside him, and silence being proclaimed, they lifted up their voices; and here's what they sung :

SONG.

I.

The world is filled with changeful light,
The clouds befleck the sky,

And o'er the fields, to harvest white,
The trooping shadows fly.
My Eveleen, come forth with me,
And rest beneath the linden-tree;
We'll watch, upon this autumn morn,
The reapers reap the heavy corn.

II.

There is a reaper, Eveleen,

His hand is rude and cold;

He reapeth the ripe-he reapeth the green,
The young as well as the old.

Oh! pray with me, true-hearted wife,
That side by side may grow our life
So close, that Reaper Death be fain
To take us both or spare us twain.

III.

The orchard trees are dense with fruit,
In cluster red and brown;

And yellow pears on every shoot

From garden-walls hang down.
Beneath the trees the gardener strays,
With careful eye the fruit surveys;
The apples ripe and mellow pears

He plucks-but still the crude he spares.

IV.

There is a gardener, Eveleen,

His eye is dull and cold:

He plucketh the ripe, he plucketh the green,

The young as well as the old.

Oh! pray with me, true-hearted wife,

So closely knit may be our life,

That Gardener Death, when gathering one,
Must break the stem both grow upon.

We went to the drawing-room, where the ceremony of cutting the bride-cake was performed. Herbert and his wife were to leave in the course of the day for a long sojourn on the Continent. The young couple slipt away, after a little time, to make their arrangements, and the company were left to their own devices to entertain themselves. I stept out into the grounds for a quiet, meditative stroll, and when passing through one of the walks I saw the young couple, with my Aunt Sampson and the good old parson, pacing one of the alleys. I

turned away into another path, for I had no doubt that the old man was, after his own fashion, preaching one of his homilies on the duties of married life. At length the hour for the departure of the Herberts arrived. The carriage was at the door, the bride had laid aside her bridal attire, and came in her travellingdress to bid us farewell. The poor girl bore up bravely till she embraced Abigail and her mother, when she almost broke down; but Uncle Saul said, cheerily, as he kissed her

"Nay, nay, girl, this will never do. Cheer up, or Herbert will think you repent your morning's vows;" and then, turning to the young man, he said, in a gentle and tremulous voice

"Be kind to her, my dear boy, she has no one now to lean on but you."

He pressed Herbert's hand, hurried them into the carriage, bid the postilion drive on, and they were soon lost to our view. As he came into the hall he met my aunt Sampson whimpering

"Come, sister, cheer up, and thank God there's one more Slingsby off our hands."

"Oh, brother Saul, how can you?" cried my aunt.

But Saul was up in the drawing-room before she could finish her expostulation, rallying the girls, and asking who was next on the list for promotion.

The majority of the guests had departed, and we were reduced to the few who were staying in the house. The dinner presented a striking contrast to the joyous breakfast party. Despite of all our efforts to be gay, there was a shade of thoughtfulness upon every face, that marred our best efforts. We all missed the presence of Herbert and his wife; we all felt as if we had lost something that we treasured.

"I do not understand," said uncle Saul, when the ladies had retired, "this fashion of leaving our own country, which is so common with young married folks now-a-days. When I was a youth people settled down in their houses after a trip of a week or two, and took steadily to the business of life. If we love our own country we ought to stay in it, and the love of one's country seems to me to be one of the truest instincts of our nature."

The parson sprang on his hobby, and set off at a canter

"The love of country," said he, "is like the love of parents; they have both their origin in the earliest dawn of reason, if they be not indeed instincts. They are associated with our first wishes, and wants, and pleasures with our very life. To the presence and providence of parents we refer everything of good we have received the origin of our being, the sustenance of our bodies, the enlightenment of our minds. They are to us pre-eminently benefactors and guardians the sentiment in which the Divine Being and cause of all things adumbrates to our perceptions that idea which is at once the sublimest and most adorable that can fill our souls the idea of universal paternity, its pre-existence, its power, its wisdom, its benignity. And so the Greek sophists, on whom the light of Nature's wisdom shone with so bright a burning, called the love of parents by the same name by which they expressed their loyalty to God-Piety. How like to this is the love of country. The earliest impressions of childhood the most vivid the most pleasurable the least dimmed with sorrow or suffering, are sure to be associated with some picture of external nature— the blue sky of heaven, the hills with whose misty outlines we are familiar, the dark woods or the bright rivers, the wild ocean-shores, or the sheltered inland plains; or, it may he, some little circumscribed nook in the quiet country or the busy town; or even some room, or chair, till they become, not the witnesses or associates of our pleasures, but, as it were, the ministrants of them - the caskets in which our most precious memories are treasured. Thus it comes that we love our native land before we have seen other lands to love, and for what no other land can give us; and thus it is that the Pietas quæ debetur patriæ' (for no apter word has been found to describe our feelings for our country than that which expresses our adoration of God, and our reverence for our parents) is one of the most inviolable and durable sentiments in every heart that is not wholly unfaithful to its earliest memories and its purest feelings

"Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos

Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui.'"

The sound of all this philosophy and Latin fell on no inattentive auditor. Mr. Caleb Chubble pricked up his ears, as the warhorse at the voice of the clarion. He was a fellow of one of the English colleges, and a professor of something, I know not what a very agreeable man, of about forty, with a dry and somewhat sarcastic humour.

"I grant all you say, my dear sir; nevertheless, I deny that a love of our own country is inconsistent with, or prejudicial to, a love of travel. As well might we fear that our intercourse with mankind should shake our love for our parents to follow out your own illustration -as that our acquaintance with other lands should weaken our affection for our own. We love the former as we never love other human beings, though we may meet many whom we feel to be their superiors; we love the latter, as the home of our childhood, with a sentiment of tenderness which no other spot may claim, though we may visit regions more lovely, more rich, or more prosperous. And so Homer, true to nature, makes the travelled hero of the " Odyssey "declare, that he had seen nothing dearer to him than his native land, barren as it was:

The professor had evidently made a fine stroke-he had returned the parson's Latin quotation with a Greek one. So thought Jack Bishop, who whispered to me in the slang of the "fancy "

"Well pitched-in. The professor has doubled up' the parson."

"And nevertheless," replied the parson, "there are high authorities against you; St. Augustine observes, for instance, Cui peregrinatio dulcis est, non amat patriam; si dulcis est patria, amara est peregrinatio.'

"The professor has caught it," said Jack; "give him a toothful of brandy.' "True," said the professor; "and Plutarch has a sentiment somewhat similar, Quibus domi nihil boni usui est, dulcis est peregrinatio;' but that holds only in the case of those unnatural or unprofitable children who have neither the virtue nor the industry to enjoy the blessings of their fatherland."

"Well recovered," said Jack; "two to one on the professor."

"I protest," said my godfather, "I don't care a rush for what Plutarch or St. Augustine (begging my old friend's pardon) thought on the subject; but, for my part, I think nothing rubs the rust off a man like travelling!"

"For which reason," joined uncle Saul, I propose we change our locality and go to the ladies."

"A very pretty match," grumbled Jack to me, sotto voce. "I wish old Freke had let them spar it out."

"Who will give us a song?" said uncle Saul, as he sipped his cup of coffee. "Mr. Bishop, of course," said Abigail; "I'm sure he has brought something

new from town."

"With all my heart, if I can get a few voices to join. Miss Abigail, you're one; here's another; nay, I know by your lips you can sing," said Jack gallantly, to one of the pretty bride-maids; "now for a bass. Mr. Chubble, do you sing?"

"I'll try," said the professor.

66

Very well; sit down, Miss Abigail, and run your finger over these cords; the melody is the simplest thing in the world. Now then allons

SONG.

I.

A maid reclined beside a stream

At fall of summer day,

And, half awake and half a-dream,
She watched the ripples play.
She marked the water's fall and heave,
The deepening shadows throng,
And heard, as darkened down the eve,
That river's babbling song.

And thus it sung, with tinkling tongue,
That rippling, shadowy river-
"Youth's brightest day will fade away
For ever and for ever!"

II.

The twilight past, the moon at last
Rose broadly o'er the night,
Each ripple gleams beneath her beams
As wrought in silver bright.
The heaving waters glide along,

But, mingling with their voice,
The nightingale now pours his song,
And makes the shades rejoice.
And thus he sung with tuneful tongue,
That bird beside the river-

"When youth is gone, true love shines on
For ever and for ever!"

"A very just sentiment," said Uncle Saul; "the best test of real love is its endurance."

"Yes," said the parson; "and the severest trials of love are often in the commencement of married life. Stand firm through them, and all will be well. Nothing is more necessary to set out with upon the conjugal voyage than mutual forbearance and mutual concession. Every little thing,' says Bishop Jeremy Taylor, can blast an infant blossom, and the breath of the south can shake the little rings of the vine when first they begin to curl like the locks of a newweaned boy; but when by age and consolidation they stiffen into the hardness of a stem, and have, by the warm embraces of the sun and the kisses of heaven, brought forth their clusters, they can endure the storms of the north and the loud noises of a tempest, and yet never be broken. So are the early unions of an unfixed marriage watchful and observant, jealous and busy, inquisitive and careful, and apt to take alarm at every unkind word.'"

"What you say is very true," replied my uncle. "All young people, when they marry, discover a thousand diversities of tastes and sentiments in each other. The best way is to leave them to themselves to rub on together, and ten to one they will wear down all those little angularities that spoil their surfaces."

"And so at last," added the Parson, with a smile, " they will become so bright and so polished, that they will reflect one another."

"Or," said Professor Chubble, somewhat maliciously, "like gold coins shaken together in a bag, they will lose all their original character and impress, as well as somewhat of their weight and value."

""Tis all very well, said my godfather, putting in his oar; "'tis all very well, that rubbing down and polishing off, provided 'tis done in moderation; but let me tell you there's such a thing as rubbing too hard. I have seen an American Indian rubbing two pieces of rough wood together. After a little time they became a great deal smoother, and had a pleasant warm feel; but when he rubbed away some time longer, they took fire, blazed up, and crackled and sputtered in all directions. Now, 'tis just the same thing, I suspect, in married life. Rub quietly, and only a little at a time, and all will go on smoothly; but if you stick to it hard and fast from morning till night, take my word for it, you will kindle up a blaze at last that you may not find it so easy to put out."

"A Latin writer," said the professor, "has suinmed up the happiness of such a union thus tartly-Bini sunt cum uxore jucundi dies. Alter quo ducitur: alter quo mortua defertur;' which means"— turning to the ladies" A married man has two happy days-one, when he brings his wife home a bride; the other, when he takes her out a corpse."

There was a storm of execration raised by the ladies at this abominable sentiment.

"I once knew," continued Professor Chubble, when the tempest was lulled, a very remarkable instance of the sad results of a jealous and over-sensitive

temper in the case of a young married couple of my own acquaintance; and if you are disposed to hear a story, I shall be happy to tell it to you."

There was a general assent to the proposition, and, after a few moments to collect his thoughts, Professor Chubble thus proceeded :

PROFESSOR CHUBBLE'S TALE.

A TRAGEDY IN MARRIED LIFE.