YESTER, _October 23, 1835_. I promised to play my part as best man, my dear Willis, at _Niagara_, and to have descended from that to Woolwich would have been a sad _bathos_, so that it was perhaps as well that your notice was too short to allow of the possibility of my being with you before the 1st of October. Still I can congratulate you as well at a distance as with my own lips, and though the romance which we proposed for ourselves is gone, I am very happy to congratulate you on the prose reality. I had written all this to you three weeks ago, and directed my frank to the Athenæum Club, a place which I took it into my head you frequented, when, this morning, the letter was returned by the porter with a “_non est inventus_” written on it. This to save my character. Furthermore, your example was so good an one, and, fortunately, so _contagious_, that I have fallen a victim, and am going to be married, and as this is _not_ a lady’s letter, it will be as well not to keep the most important part of the intelligence for the postscript, but to tell you at once that it is to Lady Susan Hay. If I were to dash out into a rhapsody you, whose experience of such a situation is of so recent a date, might easily forgive me, but I will take mercy even on you. I am happy,--happy now, and if I am not happy always in time to come, Heaven knows how utterly it will be my own fault. When next summer brings visiting time we shall meet, I trust, in Scotland, and exchange at once news, visits, and congratulations. May I beg, even though a stranger, my compliments to Mrs. Willis, and believe me Ever yours sincerely, RAMSAY. Mrs. Skinner wrote, in a letter to Jane Porter:-- “Mary Stace is a sweet, gentle, affectionate, lively girl,--natural, so that you may see at once there is no deceit in her and no guile. She is religious, accomplished, sings sweetly, is pretty, and will make Willis more happy than any other woman I know. He will have no heart-burnings, no misgivings with her, for she is true and sincere. You will love her. She was so religious, good, and depend-on-able that I told her she should be my daughter-in-law.” In his letters to his folks at home announcing his betrothal, Willis insisted a good deal on this point of his _fiancée’s_ religiousness, and he evidently shared the belief commonly held and proclaimed among men of the world, that religion, like a low voice, is an excellent thing--in woman; a theory which some women resent as a covert insult to their understandings, and some men as an open insult to their religion, and which may be described as the converse of the proposition that a reformed rake makes the best husband.