it was by the Duchesse d'Angoulême, and backed by the promise of high office on its realization. A marriage is easy to arrange in France; not so the execution of the marriage-contract, which is rendered as wearisome by delays as the still more dilatory proceedings of the law; and therefore it was deemed advisable, in order to pass this dismal period, to despatch the Count de Cambis to Holland for the purchase of horses for the royal stable. Arrived at The Hague, he was seized with an attack of smallpox, which laid him prostrate on the low flock bed of the miserable little inn to which he had been conveyed on landing from the boat. Here he lay for some time incognito, his identity unknown to any save the faithful valet who attended him, until he had perfectly recovered from the disease, which, however, was found to have left the most frightful traces of its passage in scar and seam and furrow from forehead to chin. The handsome young cavalier who landed so full of hope and spirits on the quay at The Hague rose from his bed with a face bloated and discolored, seamed and scarred and pockmarked, his once luxuriant locks grown thin and dank, his eyelashes gone, his whole appearance so changed that as he gazed at himself for the first time in the looking-glass he was overwhelmed with such despair that, as he owned afterward to his friends, he would have thrown himself from the window at which he stood into the canal below had he not been prevented by the strong arm of his servant, Dulac. A terrible period of anguish and depression followed on this first excitement, but he awoke from it and returned to life once more, a sadder and a wiser man. When the first impression of horror and dismay had passed away his resolution was taken at once. He resolved to disengage the lady from her vow, and sat down to write the words which were to rend his heart in twain. At that moment Dulac entered the room with a packet of letters just arrived from Paris by estafette. Amongst them was one from the young lady's mother, full of sweet pleasantry and graceful mirth, describing the gay doings at the Tuileries, and the delight her daughter had experienced at the idea of being allowed to attend the Duchesse d'Angoulême to the ball about to be given in honor of the visit to Paris of some one or other of the Spanish princes. She described with the greatest vivacity all the details of the toilet to be worn by her chère petite Adèle and the kindness of the royal princess, and ended with the most affectionate expressions of regret at the absence from the fête of her daughter's affianced lover, writing in playful terms of the danger in which Adèle's heart would have been placed at the accession of so many new and handsome cavaliers in attendance on the Spanish prince had it not been for the precaution of wearing, as the safest shield against all attacks, the locket which contained the portrait of her brave and beautiful lover--the miniature he had given her on his departure.