even known, under pressure, to convey a message or a hint; and of the two she is decidedly more pitiful to sorrow than severe to wrong-doing. She is in all the misfortunes and maladies of her friends. No death takes place without her bearing part of the mourning on her own soul; but then no marriage is considered complete in which she has not a share. She is called on to help whenever there is work to be done, if she be of the practical type; if of the mental, she has merely to give up her own pleasures and her time that she may look on and sympathize. Every one likes her; every one takes to her at first sight; no one is jealous of her; and the law of her life is to spend and be spent for others. It not rarely happens though, that she who does so much for those others has to bear her own burden unassisted; and that she sits at home surrounded by those spectres of despair, those ghosts of sorrow, which she helps to dispel from the homes of others. But she is not selfish; and while she trudges along cheerfully enough under the heavy end of her friend's crosses, she asks no one to lay so much as a finger on her own. In consequence of which no one imagines that she ever suffers at all on her own account; and most of her friends would take it as a personal affront were she to turn the tables and ask for the smallest portion of that of which she had given so much to others. She is the moral anodyne of her circle; and when she ceases to soothe, she abdicates the function assigned to her by nature and dies out of her allotted uses.