Aurelia, at present, is in a frightful crisis of dry goods, and is driving to the very verge of distraction a score of dress-makers, milliners and cloak-makers, who are sitting around the house like so many Patiences on monuments. Fractions of bridal dresses, traveling dresses, morning wrappers, cloaks, basques and basquines, immaculate and mysterious white garments with the most _spirituel_ ruffles and frills foaming over them, cobwebby handkerchiefs and articles in the _sanctum sanctorum_ of the toilet, the meaning of which I suspect but dare not mention--are all over the house from the garret to the cellarage; on chairs, on tables, on beds, on the piano, on lounges, on everything. I had rather undertake to walk through an acre of eggs, without breaking one of them, than to go through the house without setting my No. 11 boot heel into some frail gossamer of a dress, and rending its gauzy fabric and Aurelia's heart at the same time. All the expectations, the hopes, the responsibilities, the aims and ambitions of Aurelia's life, if not of all human lives, now depend on the difference of shade in two ribbons or the relative reflections in two different silks, on both of which she has set her heart. They are sweet pretty--but O dear! She has wept bitter tears over the total depravity of a bias and the literally infernal unreliability of a sewing machine, which will skip stitches in crises of awful importance. Three long nights she lay awake, haunted with the dreadful suspicion that her shoemaker was an impostor, and that he had not given her the latest style of slipper-tie. How could she assume the grave responsibilities of married life, if her slipper-tie were not the very latest? Of course she couldn't. She is thoroughly convinced that if anything should go wrong in the preparations for the ceremony, or in the ceremony itself, the world would cease its diurnal revolutions; there would be no further use for its axis; seed time and harvest would be alike immaterial to the farmer; ships and ledgers to the merchant; the anvil and loom to the mechanic; there would be nothing more worth living for; her career might as well be ended, the curtain come down, the lights go out, and the audience go home, without stopping for the close of the play. I pitied the Dear Child, and so, yesterday, after she had consulted the marriage column of the TRIBUNE, to see if any other person in the city had undergone her tribulations, I invited her to my den, that I might administer some consolation to her, wading in such deep waters. She gave the Patiences some parting injunctions, and each of them, from their respective monuments, looked down with weary eyes and nodded acquiescence.