For more than a month I had been ransacking my memory in search of some story or narrative to offer our readers, but with rather poor success. I thought of all the good things I had ever heard, and tumbled and tossed my books in vain--nothing could I find that was suitable for either children or parents. So I was, very reluctantly, about to abandon the enterprise, when it chanced that, being unable to compose myself to sleep, a few nights since, I took up, according to my custom on such occasions, an old copy of Montaigne, the usual companion of my vigils, the fellow-occupant of my pillow, and the only moralist whose musings one can read with pleasure on the wrong side of forty. I opened the _Essays_ carelessly, for each and every page of them is precious and replete with themes for meditation. In so doing, I alighted upon the chapter entitled, 'Of three Good Women,'--which commences thus: 'They are not to be found by the dozen, as every one knows, and especially not in the duties of married life, for that is a market full of such thorny circumstances that it is no easy matter for a woman's will to keep whole and sound in it for any length of time.' 'Montaigne is an impertinent fellow!' I exclaimed, slamming to the book. 'What? this close reader of antiquity, this fine analyst of the human heart, has been able to find only three good women, only three devoted wives, in all the Greek and Roman annals! This is playing the joker out of season. Goodness is the special attribute of woman. Every married woman is good, or supposed to be such. I bethink me, too, that our old jurists always make the law presume this goodness to exist, at the outset,' Thus meditating, I wandered into my library, and there took up a fine old volume, bound in red morocco, and entitled 'The Dream of Vergier;' a book full of wisdom and logic, and written by some venerable clerk, during the reign of Charles V., king of France. I looked for the page that had struck my fancy, but--alas! how oddly one's memory changes with the lapse of years--instead of finding, in that grave old book, the just panegyric of woman's goodness, I discovered, to my great surprise, only a violent satire all spiced with texts borrowed from St. Augustine, the Roman laws and the ancient canons, with this sage conclusion, full worthy of the exordium:-- 'I do not say, however, that there is no good woman at all, but the species is rare; and hence an old law says that no _law concerning good women_ should be made, for that laws are to be made concerning things of usual occurrence, as it is written in _Auth. sinc prohib_., etc., _quia vero_ and L. _Nam ad ca_, Dig. _De Leffibus_.'