During these latter evenings Mr Blessington has been very alert and wakeful--has insisted on being read to from tea to bed-time--a liberal hour. But, however hoarse and voiceless the young reader may be, Gerard never now comes to the rescue, never interferes, though the frequent teasing cough of the "damnable flirt" goes through his heart like a sword. With steady certainty, through frost and thaw, rain and shine, through all the alternations of an English winter, the young girl's health declines. To all but herself is this fact evident, and she, unaccustomed to illness--never having seen the signs of premature decay in others--thinks it is but a little weariness, a little languor, a nothing. It will pass when the swooned world revives into spring and the buttercups come. Sunday is here again, the initial letter in the week's alphabet: "The Sundays of man's life, Threaded together on Time's string, Make bracelets to adorn the wife Of the eternal glorious King." Ah me! the languid, yawning Sundays of most of us will make but sorry bracelets for any one, methinks. Sunday--the day on which the Shelford shopboys and shopgirls walk about gloriously apparelled, arm-in-arm, man and maid, filling their lungs with country air,--day on which the gentlefolks, such as are men of them, debarred from horse and hound and cue, smoke a cigar or two more than usual over the instructive pages of Messieurs De Kock, Sue, Balzac, etc.; while such as are women, being for the most part piously disposed, hold Goulburn's "Thoughts on Personal Religion," or Hannay's "Last Day of Our Lord's Passion," open on their velvet laps, and kill a reputation between each paragraph.