The legislative union forms a distinct epoch in Irish social life, and we cannot more fitly close this paper than by giving an account of the last meeting of the Irish House of Lords in the words of an observant and dispassionate eye-witness. After expressing his surprise at the facility with which their consent was gained, De Quincey adds: "They all rose from their couches peers of Parliament, individual pillars of the realm, indispensable parties to every law that could pass. To-morrow they will be nobody--men of straw--_terrae filii_. What madness has persuaded them to part with their birthright, and to cashier themselves and their children for ever into mere titular lords?... The bill received the royal assent without a muttering or a whispering or the protesting echo of a sigh. Perhaps there might be a little pause, a silence like that which follows an earthquake, but there was no plainspoken Lord Belhaven, as on the corresponding occasion in Edinburgh, to fill up the silence with: 'So there's an end of an auld sang.' All was, or looked, courtly and free from vulgar emotion. Thus we were set at liberty from Dublin. Parliaments and installations and masked balls, with all other secondary splendors in celebration of primary splendors, reflex glories that reverberated the original glories, at length had ceased to shine upon the Irish metropolis. The 'season,' as it is called in great cities, was over--unfortunately, the last season that was ever destined to illuminate the society or to stimulate the domestic trade of Dublin." ELIZA WILSON. VINA'S "OLE MAN." [Illustration: "DE LORD HAS DONE 'P'INTED YER TO BE A GUARDIAN ANGEL TO DAT PO' CHILE."] "Vina's got an idee she wants to git married." The speaker was a venerable darkey, who stood twirling his rimless hat with a sheepish air in the probate-office. "Rather hard for you, Father Abram," said the judge kindly, "but it's a way girls have. I presume my daughter will be leaving me some day in the same ungrateful fashion. Bring around Vina's man and I will make out the license." Father Abram's manner became at once more confused and ludicrous: he poised himself alternately on either foot, and scratched his head vigorously, while his facial expression was something too comical for description. Finally, through a series of embarrassed chuckles and gurgles, he rippled into a broad guffaw, articulating indistinctly between its paroxysms, "Bress de Lord, sah! I'se de man!" "Shades of the mighty!" exclaimed the judge, in his astonishment dropping his pen upon a virgin page in his docket. "But the United States is a Christian country, Abram, and a man can't marry his own daughter here: it's contrary to law and gospel." "Yes, sah?" said the negro submissively. "Den dar ain't no way for me an' Vina to git married, not even if we go over to Platte City? Vina'll be mightily disappointed."