If our readers, gentle or simple, will obligingly stretch their imaginations sufficiently to depict for themselves the happiness of Alice and Harry during the first month of their married life, popularly denominated the honeymoon, and be content to permit us to resume our office of chronicler at the termination of that mellifluous (though, to all but the parties concerned, especially insipid) season, the readers aforesaid will merit our eternal gratitude, which we hereby beg to present them with. Alice and Harry, then, having been married one calendar mouth, during which period they had been “up” the Rhine, and one or two of the Swiss mountains--having seen a great many strange things and strange people--having talked a vast amount of bad French and worse German, and narrowly escaped an attack of cholera from listening to the dissonance of that arch-delusion the _Ranz-des-Vaches_--having eaten such wonderful articles, cooked in such wonderful fashion, that if the genus Bimana were not providentially omnivorous, they would infallibly have been poisoned--having travelled over land and water by every species of conveyance known to the annals of locomotion, except perhaps a balloon, or the back of an elephant--had at length made their way to Paris; and as the inhabitants of that skittish and inconstant capital were then figuratively patting each other on the back, by way of congratulation on the fortunate accident which had preserved those that remained alive after the latest revolution from having shot each other through the head, our bride and bridegroom, established in a comfortable hotel, had determined to remain there till such time as they should mutually agree upon for their return to England. For, be it observed, that enough of the halo of the honeymoon yet lingered around this young couple, to keep them in the misty delusion that they possessed but one “will of their own” between them. They had yet to learn that there is a higher, truer, nobler state of association to be arrived at, even here on earth--a state in which we recognise the deep happiness of being privileged to sacrifice our own desires to those of the being we love better than ourselves. A logician may stigmatise this as merely a refined phase of selfishness; but it is such selfishness as might cling to us in heaven, and we yet remain sinless. Be this as it may, Alice, who had never been abroad before, found every pleasure enhanced by the charm of novelty, and was in a perfect Elysium of happy excitement. Harry had seen and done it all, and a great deal more besides; and would have found it a bore, only it was sufficient amusement to him to watch his young wife’s delight at all she saw and heard. Whether this amusement of watching, petting, and spoiling Alice, was at all beginning to lose its charm, may be gathered from the following conversation:--