Oh, all my readers!--masculine especially--whose patience has carried you thus far, remark, I beseech you, the dangers that attend any dereliction from the duty of matrimonial confidence. What right have we to lock up the secrets of our most intimate friends, far less our own, instead of pouring them into the bosom of the [Greek: _bathukolpos akoitis_], which is capacious enough to hold them all, were they tenfold more numerous and weighty? Such reticence is rife with awful peril. In our folly and blindness, we fancy ourselves secure, while the ground is mined under our guilty feet, and the explosion is even now preparing, from which only our _disjecta membra_ will emerge. Of course, some cold-hearted caviler will begin to quote instances of carefully-planned and promising conspiracies, which miscarried solely because the details reached a feminine ear. It may have been so; but I don't see what business conspiracies have to succeed at all. Long live the Constitution! Truly, such delightful confidences must be something one-sided, for the mildest Griselda of them all would be led as a "Martha to the Stakes" sooner than concede to her husband the unrestricted supervision of her correspondence. I have indeed a dim recollection of having heard of _one_ bride of seventeen, who, during the honeymoon, was weak and (_selon les dames_) wicked enough to submit to profane male eyes epistles received from the friends of her youth, in their simple entirety, instead of reading out an expurgated edition of the same. She had been brought up in a very dungeon of decorum by a terrible grandmother, a rigid moralist, whom no man ever yet beheld without a shiver; and during those first few weeks after her escape she was probably intoxicated by the novel sense of freedom, besides which, she was perfectly infatuated about "Reginald;" but all this could not exculpate her when arraigned before her peers. She lived long enough to repent and to reassert, to some extent, her lost matronly dignity, but she died very young--let us hope in fair course of nature. She had violated the first law of a guild more numerous and influential than that of the Freemasons. Examples are necessary from time to time, and, though the _Vehme-gericht_ may pity the offender, it may not therefore linger in its vengeance. Nevertheless, my brethren, our course is clear. Let us resign to the chatelaine the key of the letter-bag and the censorship thereof. If, after due warning, our light-minded friends _will_ write to us in terms that mislike that excellent and punctilious inspectress, they must aby it in the cold looks and bitter innuendoes which will be their portion when they come to us in the next hunting season. Our conscience, at least, will be pure and undefiled, and we shall pass to the end of our pilgrimage _sans peur_, though perchance, even then, not _sans reproche_. "Servitudes," as Miggs, the veteran vestal remarked, "is no inheritance," but there are natures who thrive