And from that time the queen never lost an opportunity of serving my mother and her family, and it is to her I owe the favor and patronage of the minister Colbert. "And now, children," said Perrault, "how do you like my last fairy tale?" [From Dickens's Household Words.] THE EFFORTS OF A GENTLEMAN IN SEARCH OF DESPAIR. Mr. Blackbrook lived in a world of his own. It was his pleasure to believe that men were phantoms of a day. For life he had the utmost contempt. He pronounced it to be a breath, a sigh, a fleeting shadow. His perpetual theme was, that we are only here for a brief space of time. He likened the uncertainty of existence to all the most frightful ventures he could conjure up. He informed timid ladies that they were perpetually on the edge of a yawning abyss; and warned little boys that their laughter might be turned to tears and lamentation, at the shortest notice. Mr. Blackbrook was a welcome guest in a large serious circle. From his youth he had shown a poetic leaning, of the most serious order. His muse was always in deep mourning--his poetic gum oozed only from his favorite grave-yard. He thought "L'Allegro" Milton's worst performance; and declared that Gray's "Elegy in a Country Church-yard" was too light and frivolous. His life was not without its cares; but, then, he reveled in his misfortunes. He was always prepossessed with a man who wore a hatband. The owl was his favorite bird. A black cat was the only feline specimen he would admit to his sombre apartment; and his garden was stocked with yew-trees. He reveled in the charm of melancholy--he would not, if he could, be gay. His meditations raised him so great a height above his family, that little sympathy could exist between them. Eternity so engaged him, that his brothers and sisters--mere phantoms--did not cost him much consideration. His youthful Lines to the Owl, in the course of which he called the bird in question "a solemn messenger," "a dread image of the moral darkness which surrounds us," "a welcome voice," and "a mysterious visitant," indicated the peculiar turn of his mind. His determination to be miserable was nothing short of heroic. In his twenty-second year a relation left him a modest fortune. His friends flocked about him to congratulate him; but they found him in a state of seraphic sorrow, searching out a proper rhyme to the urn in which he had poetically deposited the ashes of his benefactor. On looking over the lines he had distilled from his prostrate heart, his friends, to their astonishment, discovered that he had alluded to the bequest in question in the most contemptuous strain: Why leave to one thy velvet and thy dross, Whose wealth is boundless, and whose velvet's moss?