I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But why we, who are not their natural-born subjects, should be expected to bring our spices, myrrh, and incense,―our tribute and homage of admiration,-I do not see.

"Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children:" so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed for the churching of women. "Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them :" so say I; but then don't let him discharge his quiver upon us that are weaponless ;-let them be arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed that these arrows are double-headed: they have two forks, to be sure to hit with one or the other. As, for instance, where you come into a house which is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking of something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses), you are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other hand, if you find them more than usually engaging,—if you are taken with their pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp and play with them, some pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room: they are too noisy or boisterous, or Mr does not

like children.

hit you.

With one or other of these forks the arrow is sure to

I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with their brats, if it gives them any pain; but I think it unreasonable to be called upon to love them, where I see no occasion,-to love a whole family, perhaps, eight, nine, or ten, indiscriminately,-to love all the pretty dears, because children are so engaging.

I know there is a proverb, "Love me, love my dog:" that is not always so very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing, -any inanimate substance, as a keep-sake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when my friend went away upon a long absence, I can make shift to love, because I love him. and any thing that reminds me of him; provided it be in its nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children have a real character and an essential being of themselves they are amiable or unamiable per se; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either in their qualities. A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly: they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. O! but you will say, sure it is an attractive age,— there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself

charms us. That is the very reason why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest.-I was always rather squeamish in my women and children.

But this is not the worst: one must be admitted into their familiarity at least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,-if you did not come in on the wife's side,— if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,-look about you-your tenure is precarious-before a twelvemonth shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage. With some limitations they can endure that: but that the good-man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him, before they that are now man and wife ever met,— this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these new mintings.

Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of their husband's confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, but an oddity, is one of the ways;—they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose;―till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humorist,—a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has oftenest been put in pracLice against me.

Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony: that is, where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which he has conceived towards you; by neverqualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the goodman, who understands well enough that it is all done in compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so much candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to that kindly level of moderate esteem,-that "decent affection and complacent kindness" towards you, where she herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence to her sincerity.

Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr as a great wit." If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, "This, my dear, is your good Mr One good lady, whom I took the liberty of expostulating with for not showing me quite so much respect as I thought due to her husband's old friend, had the candour to confess to me that she had often heard Mr speak of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her expectations; for from her husband's representations of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall, officer-like looking man (I use her very words); the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This was candid; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband's friends which differed so much from his own; for my friend's dimensions as near as possible ap、 proximate to mine; he standing five feet in his shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no more than myself exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his

air or countenance.

These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour: I shall therefore just glance at the

very common impropriety of which married ladies are guilty,-of treating us as if we were their husbands, and vice versa. I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr did not come home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was reversing the point of good manners: for ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's importunities to go to supper, she would have acted according to the strict rules of propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behaviour and decorum: therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which I was applying to with great good will, to her husband at the other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary gooseberries to my unwedded palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse the wanton affront of

But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their names, to the terror of all such desperate offenders in future.

SONNET.

EVENING.

SEE'ST thou how clear and sharp the shadows are

Among the cattle on yon ridgy field;

So softly glooming amid light so fair:

Yon mighty trees no blasts may dare to wield;

The things that own most motion and most sound

Are tranced and silent in a golden swound;

Where is the wind? Not in yon glassy sky

Not in the trees-What deep tranquillity

Has hush'd his voice? Methinks so calm should fall

That eve before the great millennial morn,
Before the first of those high days is born,
Whose placid tenor shall be peace to all :
Sink deeply in my thought, surpassing scene!

And be thy memory clear, for I would live therein.

CHARLES TENNYSON

THE CAPTAIN'S LADY.

AN AMERICAN STORY."

AFTER an absence of several years from my native city, I had lately the pleasure of paying it a visit ; and having spent a few days with my friends, was about to bid adieu, once more, to the goodly and quiet streets of Philadelphia. The day had not yet dawned, and I stood trembling at the door of the stage-office, muffled in a great coat, while the driver was securing my baggage. The streets were still and tenantless, and not a foot seemed to be travelling but my own. Every body slept, gentle and simple; for sleep is a gentle and simple thing. The watchmen slumbered; and the very lamps seemed to have caught the infectious drowsiness. I felt that I possessed at that moment a lordly pre-eminence among my fellow citizens; for they were all torpid, as dead to consciousness as swallows in the winter, or mummies in a catacomb. I alone had sense, knowledge, power, energy. The rest were all perdu-shut up, like the imprisoned genii, who were bottled away by Solomon, and cast into the sea. I could release them from durance in an instant; I could discharge either of them from imprisonment, or I could suffer the whole to remain spell-bound until the appointed time for their enlargement. Every thing slept; mayor, aldermen, and councils, the civil and the military, learning, and beauty, and eloquence, porters, dogs, and drays, steam engines and patent machines,-even the elements reposed.

If it had not been so cold, I could have moralized upon the deathlike torpor that reigned over the city. As it was, I could not help admiring that wonderful regulation of nature, which thus periodically suspends the vital powers of a whole people. There is nothing so cheering as the bustle of a crowd, nothing more awful than its repose. When we behold the first, when we notice the vast aggregate of human life so variously occupied, so widely diffused, so powerful, and so buoyant, a sensation is produced like that with which we gaze at the ocean when agitated by a storm-a sense of the utter inadequacy of human power to still such a mass of troubled particles; but when sleep strews her poppies, it is like the pouring of oil upon the waves.

I had barely time to make this remark, when two figures rapidly approached-two of Solomon's genii escaped from duresse. Had

* From "Stories of American Life. Edited by Miss Mitford." 3 vols.Miss Mitford does not specify the sources from which she gathers her extracts.

M 3