But as usual, the crowning glory of most anxious labor is to be sought in the female characters. These are nearly all of the majestic, haughty, and queen-like caste--tall, imperious beauties, empresses of society, to whom men are slaves, and life a triumphal march of unbroken conquests. So it is at least until they meet some one terrible subduer of woman--a Guy or a Keene--in whom they recognize masterhood, and the right and power to reign. With the last stateliness of royalty these magnificent presences glide through the proud pomp and pageantry of their surroundings, graceful as swans, faultless in classic form, and face as white as Grecian marbles, domineering as sisters of Caesars, violet eyed, statuesque, cold upon the chiselled surface, but aglow with the white heat of feeling and forceful passion beneath. How blue are their clear veins interlacing beneath a crystalline skin!--for their blood is a more sublimed fluid than that which waters the clay of ordinary humanity. They have with them an unutterable glory of conscious power, the magnificence of a perfect, God-given nature, such a haughty spirit of rivalless dominion as might have swelled the soul of a Jewish queen, monarch of Israel, ruler of God's chosen people in the day of their unbroken pride, when she felt that none greater than herself dwelt upon the globe. But with inevitable tread approaches the universal moral which points the tale. The measured step of the godlike hero echoeth along the corridors. The royal maiden, hearing the ominous tramp, is cognizant of an unwonted thrill and a sensation unfelt before. Her prophetic instinct telleth her too truly that her wild independence is concluded, that the day of bondage and of fetters has dawned, that the inexorable One, who alone in all the millions of created men is able, is even now present with, the gyves of her slavery in his hand. But the denouement is never at the bridal altar. Our host entertaineth us with no loves of Strephon and Phillis, nor leads beneath shady arcades to a vine-clad cottage, wherein is love and rich cream and homemade butter. The three sisters, the dread Moirae, in their darksome cavern, spinning the golden thread of destiny, reel from their distaff no bright soft film of wedded happiness. The polished metal, many times refined, would never show half its qualities were it not subject to unwonted tests. We suffer according to our powers of endurance, and are tried according to our gifts. Else why are the powers and the gifts given to us by a Providence which never wasteth, nor doeth in freakish negligence. The yoke of love is not weighty enough to bow sufficiently the curving neck. With a love which cannot be satisfied comes the mighty temptation to sin and disgrace. Even into this black chasm our beauties look with steady eye, and meditate the step. It is a part of their self-sustaining nature and towering spirit to wreak their own will. Once let them give their