woman, took Mary aside, and told her that such a thing must not be. There would come, she said, children, and destitution, and ruin. She knew perhaps more than Mary knew when Mary told us her story, sitting opposite to us in the low arm-chair. It was the advice of the vicar’s wife that the engagement should be broken off; but that, if the breaking-off of the engagement were impossible, there should be an indefinite period of waiting. Such engagements cannot be broken off. Young hearts will not consent to be thus torn asunder. The vicar’s wife was too strong for them to get themselves married in her teeth, and the period of indefinite waiting was commenced. And now for a moment we will go further back among Mary’s youthful days. Child as she seemed to be, she had in very early years taken a pen in her hand. The reader need hardly be told that had not such been the case there would not have arisen any cause for friendship between her and us. We are telling an Editor’s tale, and it was in our editorial capacity that Mary first came to us. Well;--in her earliest attempts, in her very young days, she wrote--Heaven knows what; poetry first, no doubt; then, God help her, a tragedy; after that, when the curate-influence first commenced, tales for the conversion of the ungodly;--and at last, before her engagement was a fact, having tried her wing at fiction, in the form of those false little dialogues between Tom the Saint and Bob the Sinner, she had completed a novel in one volume. She was then seventeen, was engaged to be married, and had completed her novel! Passing her in the street you would almost have taken her for a child to whom you might give an orange. Hitherto her work had come from ambition,--or from a feeling of restless piety inspired by the curate. Now there arose in her young mind the question whether such talent as she possessed might not be turned to account for ways and means, and used to shorten, perhaps absolutely to annihilate, that uncertain period of waiting. The first novel was seen by “a man of letters” in her neighbourhood, who pronounced it to be very clever;--not indeed fit as yet for publication, faulty in grammar, faulty even in spelling,--how I loved the tear that shone in her eye as she confessed this delinquency!--faulty of course in construction, and faulty in character;--but still clever. The man of letters had told her that she must begin again.