element of truth, as opposed to the fiction of poetry: they bade each other adieu before parting _for ever_. There may be little enough humor in this story, given thus barely, but Mr. Perkins's droll tone of voice and the mirthful twinkle in his eye kept us in peals of laughter while he related the adventure. The history gained an added zest from the frankness of the narrator, for it proved once again how little the gold of his nature was cheapened by the dross of an assumed ultra-holiness, which more than anything else is repulsive to young people when coming from a religious Mentor. "Was _you_ ever a little girl?" asks the pranksome Miss Lotta in one of her nursery-rhyme plays of a particularly cross and crabbed old grenadier of an aunt. A similar question was never propounded to Mr. Perkins. No boy in Hurville--even the copper-toed ruffians of the editor's wife--entertains any doubts of the unadulterated boyishness, at some remote period, of Mr. Perkins. His pious monitions and enthusiastic essays to lead the boys in the path of a noble manhood lose nothing from the knowledge. It was now the turn of Mrs. Marcellus to speak. We peremptorily bade her unfold herself, as did Hamlet the Ghost. She smiled and craved a minute's grace in which to serve us all anew fresh jorums of the fragrant Kyshow Congou--a tea unparalleled which she imports herself direct from Oxford Circus in famed London Town--and when the incense of the fragrant brew rose on the ambient air of the yellow satin drawing-room our hostess desired us to rattle our teaspoons and clatter our cups and saucers with a will, as she thought, she said, that a little confusion would enable her to get through the recital with more courage. In spite of this request, the most unobtrusive mice could scarcely have been more noiseless than we as we listened to her narrative, not a word of which escaped our attentive ears. "You know," began Mrs. Marcellus, "that it is now five years since the double wedding of my two darling daughters, parting from whom was such a dreadful cross for me to bear. Every mother knows how sharp a pang it gives to transfer to another, almost a stranger--a man whose very existence six months or a year before was unknown to us--the treasured being whose smiles and tears have been since babyhood her mother's rain and sunshine. Ah me! if mothers suffer in this way at the marriage of one daughter, think how doubly great must the trial have been to me when I was called upon to relinquish both my girls at once--to see them both go away on the train, joyous and happy with the men of their choice, while nothing was left for me but to come back here into the empty house and begin a new plan of existence with the vivifying and soul-sustaining element of constant and ever-present love left out! I don't think any one in Hurville had the slightest glimmering of an idea of what I suffered."