"Eternal fidelity"--being, of course, the first article agreed and sworn to in the lovers' parting covenant, "Constant correspondence," as naturally came second in the list, and never was eagerness like Walter's to pour out the first sorrows of absence in his first letter to the beloved, or impatience like his for the appearance of her answer. After some decorous delay----(a _little_ maiden coyness was thought decorous in those days)--it arrived, the delightful letter! Delightful it would have been to Walter, in that second effervescence of his first passion, had the penmanship of the fair writer been barely legible, and her epistolary talent not absolutely below the lowest degree of mediocrity. Walter (to say the truth) had felt certain involuntary misgivings on that subject. Himself not only an ardent admirer of nature, but an unaffected lover of elegant literature, he had been frequently mortified at Adrienne's apparent indifference to the one, and seeming distaste to the other. Of her style of writing he had found no opportunities of judging. Albums were not the fashion in those days--and although, on the few occasions of his absence from St Hilaire after his engagement with Adrienne (Caen being still his ostensible place of residence), he had not failed to indite to her sundry billets, and even full-length letters, dispatched (as on a business of life and death) by bribed and special messengers,--either Mlle. de St Hilaire was engaged or abroad when they arrived--or otherwise prevented from replying; and still more frequently the lover trod on the heels of his despatch. So it chanced that he had not carried away with him one hoarded treasure of the fair one's writing. And as to books--he had never detected the "dame de ses pensées" in the act of reading anything more intellectual than the words for a new Vaudeville, or a letter from her Paris milliner. He had more than once proposed to read aloud to her--but either she was seized with a fit of unconquerable yawning before he proceeded far in his attempt--or the migraine, or the vapours, to which distressing ailments she was constitutionally subject--were sure to come on at the unfortunate moment of his proposition--and thus, from a combination of untoward accidents, he was not only left in ignorance of his mistress's higher attainments, but at certain moments of disappointed feeling reduced to form conjectures on the subject, compared to which "ignorance was bliss;" and to some lingering doubts of the like nature, as well as to lover-like impatience, might be attributable the nervous trepidation with which he broke the seal of her first letter. That letter!--The first glimpse of its contents was a glimpse of Paradise!--The first hurried reading transported him to the seventh heaven--and the twentieth (of course, dispassionately critical) confirmed him in the fruition of its celestial beatitudes. Seriously speaking, Walter Barnard