traits without one shadow from the coming cloud of passion, when the flowers of affection give out their richest perfume, unmingled with the envenomed sweets with which future years will imbue them. Ernest Melvyn had grown up tall and handsome, but with the pale cheek and thoughtful brow of the habitual thinker. His eyes were usually veiled beneath their full and drooping lids, but they were full of intelligence and sweetness, while his form was as graceful and his step as free as if he had never trod other soil than that of the green hills where his sunny hours of childhood had been passed. His application to business had given him a degree of gravity beyond his years, and his love of reading had made him a quiet observer of society rather than an actor in its busy scenes. His time was divided between his duties in the warehouse, his attention to his infirm mother, and his visits to Mr. Allison’s family; the first tended to create stability of character, the second to cultivate the domestic affections, and quicken his delicate sense of duty, while the last gave him the inestimable advantage of polished and virtuous female society. Could he have overcome his reserve, and learned to think less humbly of himself, Ernest Melvyn might have shone in the gayest circles, for, even in a place where wealth too often determines a man’s social position, the protégé of the rich Mr. Allison would have found little difficulty in winning his way. Had Ernest understood the “_art of pushing_,” an art, by the way, which deserves to be made the subject of a course of lectures, he could easily have become a general favorite in society, and might, in all probability, by some fortunate marriage, have compassed what the world pleasantly calls “_Independence_,” in other words, a lifelong subsistence upon the alimony of a wife. But Ernest was too modest, too single-minded to think of such things. The liberal stipend which he received from Mr. Allison more than sufficed for all his mother’s necessities, and his own wants were very few. A small sum was annually left in his benefactor’s hands, to form a fund for his mother’s future support in case of his death, and with this provision he was perfectly content. As his tastes developed, his gradually increasing means enabled him to gratify them without encroaching upon this consecrated hoard. Books, purchased chiefly at auction, and remarkable rather for their solid worth, than their exterior decorations, had accumulated around him, a few choice paintings which he had found among the rubbish of a deceased picture dealer, now adorned the walls of his neat apartment, a collection of minerals, made with no other expense than that of healthful fatigue, a small but very complete cabinet of shells, miniature casts from the antique, moulded by himself in moments of leisure, and a portfolio of exquisite pencil-drawings by his own hand, all attested the elegance of his tastes and the innocence of his pursuits.