“I should think patience and resignation—an ounce each, thoroughly compounded—would be the most necessary remedy for a sprain,” replied Harriet—and the conversation turned on other subjects. We examined the shawl, and pronounced it unmendable and I offered to lend her my mantilla. “I will accept it,” said she, “if you will yourself accompany it and assist me in making some purchases this morning. Sally Murphy, who has lived with us so long, is about being married, and father intends furnishing her house for her. It is a small tenement with only four rooms, but it will be all her own, and she would not be more delighted with a palace.” I was soon ready, and we walked to the cabinet-makers, who was delighted to furnish what we wanted, and then to that “omnium gatherum,” yclept, “the dry goods store,” where we found every thing necessary for our purpose, from the lace for the bride’s dress to the carpet that was to adorn her “keeping-room.” “These are my part of the wedding presents,” said Hattie. “I earned the money—you know how?” I have said that I had a plan in view, in which my brother and Hattie were to be the principal actors, and you will readily perceive that though not much given to meddling with the affairs of other people, I was sufficiently feminine in my tastes to be something of a matchmaker. Notwithstanding his fine intellectual powers and considerable knowledge derived from men and books, Fred had always been exceedingly deficient in the ability to say and do those graceful nothings that are the usual stepping-stones to an acquaintance between ladies and gentlemen, and this, added to a certain bashfulness that frequently attends a proud, sensitive nature, had kept him from finding any intimate friends among the ladies he had met in his college life, and in his subsequent wanderings over the world. Unfortunately, too, for my matrimonial schemes in his behalf, he was provokingly contented with the prospect of being an old bachelor; and since his establishment in our village, had confined his visits to a few married ladies who were vastly superior in cultivation of mind to any of the unmarried ones of our acquaintance. Thus with a handsome person, and more than ordinary powers of pleasing, had he chosen to exert them, my brother had passed to the shady side of thirty, without having his large, warm heart stirred by a deeper emotion than the quiet love excited by the home circle. I was determined this state of things should not endure much longer, and to Harriet I looked for aid in breaking the spell of indifference that was consigning him to the lonely and selfish existence of a confirmed old bachelor.