effects of his most elegant toilet upon the hearts of any of the young girls of his class, until his own heart was seriously engaged. Valentine's deportment was characterized by habitual pensiveness and reserve, occasionally broken by sudden unaccountable fits of excitement, strange flights of fancy, and startling, frightful paroxysms of passion, having many of the features of incipient insanity. These were undoubtedly to be attributed to the antagonistic constituents of his nature. What alchemy but the all-powerful grace of God could ever harmonize the discordant elements of a being deriving his descent from three races so different as the Indian, the Negro, and the Saxon, and reconcile him to the position in which this boy was placed? Mr. Waring, soon after his return home, began to lead a wild, reckless life. He kept bachelor's hall at Red Hill, in extravagant style. Frequent dinners, suppers, and wine parties, with cards, billiards, dice, etc., converted the quiet old country house into a scene of wild midnight orgies, with drinking, song-singing, and gambling, that threatened soon to leave the young spendthrift without a house to revel in, or a dollar to revel on. And almost every day, when there was not a party at the house, Valentine would have to drive his master in the buggy to the town. Upon such occasions, the master would go to some favorite restaurant or billiard saloon, or perhaps to some wine or card party, to which he had been invited, while the man would take the buggy to the livery stable, and lounge about town until the small hours of the morning, when he would rouse the sleepy groom at the stables, get his buggy and horse, and take his master home. Sometimes Mr. Waring would be slightly elevated by the wine he had drank, but never to the degree of intoxication. At first, and for a long while, Valentine resisted the temptations of the life into which he was led; but, in the course of time, those listless hours of waiting in town wore away his good habits; and it at last happened that, while the master was gambling and drinking in some splendid saloon, the man would be imitating him in some humbler scene of dissipation. And when he would have to drive Mr. Waring home, it not unfrequently happened that both were under the influence of wine. To poor Phædra, who happily had some time since found that grace of God that she had so long and humbly and earnestly desired, this conduct in her young master and her son gave the greatest distress and anxiety. With Valentine she often and earnestly expostulated; and the impressible boy, for boy he continued to be to the day of his death, would promise with tears in his eyes, to amend. Even with Oswald Waring, using the privilege of the old nurse, she ventured to reason, faithfully, fearlessly, sorrowfully. But, in his thoughtless, good-humored way, he laughed in her face, called her a well-meaning old woman, but advised her to attend to her own concerns.