The wedding-day arrived; and the bride groom, manifesting a most flattering impatience for the performance of the ceremony, came early to the house of his affianced, to accompany the family party to the magistrates, where the contract was to be drawn up. But even on that momentous day Madame L---- adhered to her custom of waiting for the post, to the evident rage and even agonized impatience of her destined son-in-law, who urged her with passionate eagerness to proceed at once to the magistrates. The delay proved most serviceable. The post came in due time, and brought a letter from Marseilles. The writer, struck by some slight personal peculiarities which her friend had described, had fancied it possible that the _promesso sposo_ was no other than _an escaped galley-slave_, with whom, before his condemnation for a heinous crime, her family had been intimate. She had therefore, in some alarm, caused her husband to make inquiries into the matter, and a sufficient mass of evidence had been collected to justify her suspicion, and cause her to urge inquiry and delay on the part of M. and Madame L----. She suggested, moreover, that the truth might be easily discovered by a personal examination of the gentleman, who, if the same individual, had been branded on the right shoulder. The surprise, horror, and alarm of Madame L---- may be imagined. The contents of the letter were of course instantly communicated by her to her husband, and by him privately to the bridegroom, whom he requested to satisfy his wife's fears by showing him his right shoulder. The request was indignantly refused as an insult to his honor; and convinced of the fact by the agitation and dismay of the culprit, as well as by this refusal, the gentleman gave him at once into the hands of the police, who had no difficulty in finding the fatal mark of infamy. He was, indeed, an escaped convict, and the wealth with which he had dazzled the good provincials was the spoil of a recent robbery, undertaken by himself and some Parisian accomplices, and so cleverly managed as to have set at naught hitherto the best efforts of the police for its discovery. We may be sure Madame L---- congratulated herself highly on having, as if by a providential instinct, "waited for the post." CHEERFUL VIEWS OF HUMAN NATURE. BY THE KING OF THE HEARTH. "Do thee go on, Phil," said a miner, one of sixteen who sat about a tap-room fire, "Do thee go on, Phil Spruce; and, Mrs. Pittis, fetch us in some beer." "And pipes," added a boy. Mr. Spruce contemplated his young friend with a grim smile. "Well," said he, "it's a story profitable to be heard, and so--" "Ay, so it be," said a lame man, who made himself a little more than quits with Nature, by working with his sound leg on the floor incessantly. "So it be," said Timothy Drum, "Phil's a philosopher." "It always strucked me," said a dirty little man, "that Phil has had a sort of nater in him ever since that night we lost old Tony Barker."