Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violetnature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood, shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the matrimonial bond cannot be held to include the three fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? And as a matter of conscience and good morals, ought not an English married pair to insist upon the celebration of a Silver Wedding at the end of

twenty-five years in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that corporeal growth of which both parties have individually come into possession since they were pronounced one flesh ?-Our Old Home.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

(BORN, 1807-DIED, 1882.)

A WRAITH IN THE MIST.

Sir, I should build me a fortification, If I came to live here."-BOSWELL'S Johnson.

Ο

N the green little isle of Inchkenneth,
Who is it that walks by the shore,
So gay with his Highland blue bonnet,
So brave with his targe and claymore?

His form is the form of a giant,

But his face wears an aspect of pain; Can this be the Laird of Inchkenneth? Can this be Sir Allan McLean?

Ah, no! It is only the Rambler,

The Idler, who lives in Bolt Court,

And who says, were he Laird of Inchkenneth, He would wall himself round with a fort.

-Birds of Passage.

EDMUND QUINCY.

(BORN, 1808-DIED, 1877.)

WHO PAID FOR THE PRIMA DONNA?

I.

F any thing could make a man forgive himself for being sixty years old," said the Consul, holding up his wineglass between his eye and the setting sun,-for it was summer-time," it would be that he can remember Malibran in her divine sixteenity at the Park Theatre, thirty odd years ago. Egad, sir, one could n't help making great allowances for Don Giovanni, after seeing her in Zerlina. She was beyond imagination piquante and delicious."

The Consul, as my readers may have partly inferred, was not a Roman Consul, nor yet a French one. He had had the honor of representing this great republic at one of the Hanse towns, I forget which, in President Monroe's time. I don't recollect how long he held the

office; but it was long enough to make the title stick to him for the rest of his life with the tenacity of a militia colonelcy or village diaconate. The country people round about used to call him "the Counsel," which, I believe, for I am not very fresh from my schoolbooks, was etymologically correct enough, however orthoëpically erroneous. He had not limited his European life, however, within the precinct of his Hanseatic consulship, but had dispersed himself very promiscuously over the Continent, and had seen many cities, and the manners of many men and of some women,singing-women, I mean,-in their public character; for the Consul, correct of life as of ear, never sought to undeify his divinities by pursuing them from the heaven of the stage to the purgatorial intermediacy of the coulisses, still less to the lower depth of disenchantment into which too many of them sunk in their private life.

"Yes, sir," he went on, "I have seen and heard them all,-Catalani, Pasta, Pezzaroni, Grisi, and all the rest of them, even Sonntag, though not in her very best estate; but I give you my word there is none that has taken lodgings here," tapping his forehead, "so per