obtained when it appeared in the magazine, what force and condensation of matter is required in writing for periodicals. CHAPTER THIRTY ONE. I am grave to-day; it is the birth-day of one of my children--a day so joyful in youth, in more advanced life so teeming with thought and serious reflections. How happy the child is--and it is its happiness which has made me grave. How changed are our feelings as we advance in life!--Our responsibility is increased with each fleeting year. In youth we live but for ourselves--self predominates in every thing. In mature age, if we have fulfilled the conditions of our tenure, we feel that we must live for our children. Fortunately, increase of years weans us from those selfish and frivolous expenses which youth requires, and we feel it little or no sacrifice to devote to our children the means which, before, we considered so important to the gratification of our pride and our ambition. Not that we have lost either our pride or our ambition, but they have become centred in other objects dearer to us than ourselves--in the race springing up--to whom we shall leave our names and worldly possessions when our own career is closed. Worn out with the pursuit of vanity, we pause at a certain age, and come to the conclusion that in this life we require but little else than to eat, drink, prepare for a future existence, and to die. What a miserable being must an old bachelor be!--he vegetates, but he cannot be said to exist--he passes his life in one long career of selfishness, and dies. Strange, that children, and the responsibility attached to their welfare, should do more to bring a man into the right path than any denunciations from holy writ or holy men! How many who might have been lost, have been, it is to be hoped, saved, from the feeling that they must leave their children a good name, and must provide for their support and advancement in life! Yes, and how many women, after a life so frivolous as to amount to wickedness, have, from their attachment to their offspring, settled down into the redeeming position of careful, anxious, and serious-minded mothers!