He married a beautiful Seraphina, afterward countess, graceful and lady-like, once the daughter of a girdle-maker, and named Lorenza Feliciani. Every one, simple or sedate, knows that it is best to hunt in couples. What one has not the other may have. So Seraphina had beauty, lightness, buoyancy, and could float up her count when the demons and harpies of a certain troublesome devil, called law or justice, seemed bent upon his swift destruction. Could she not, too, "enlist the sympathies of admiring audiences"--by her sweet smiles and "artless ways," gain belief, and "a wish to believe?" More than that, could she not turn the heads of young and old? "noble" perhaps, perhaps "ignoble"--"moneyed do-nothings" (so says this writer), whereof in this vexed earth there are many, ever lounging about such (?) places--scan and comment on the foreign coat-of-arms--ogle the fair foreign woman, who timidly recoils from their gaze, timidly responds to their reverences, as in halls and passages they obsequiously throw themselves in her way. Ere long, one moneyed do-nothing (from amid his tags, tassels, sword-belts, fop-tackle, frizzled hair, without brains beneath it) is heard speaking to another--"Seen the countess?--divine creature that!" Indeed, one cannot but wonder that any should question the unity of the race, at least, of those known as "civilized." In a small way, or in a large way, how this thing ever goes on--on church steps, on Broadways, in Metropolitan Halls, Congresses, the Palais-Royal, at home and abroad! And men do yet call _this_ "reverence for the sex," and holy sentiment; and indulge in hallelujahs to that hoary myth, "a gentleman of the old school;" while women--God help us--women loving it, hate those who, hating it, hate hollowness and hell. With slight imagination, then, one may see how important an element this "divine creature" must have become in any conjuration or mystic "renovation of the universe," which the high mystagogue might be impressed to set on foot. Enough, that _she_ helped and learned the arts of prophecy and perfection faster than her master! But we read--alas! alas!--"As his seraphic countess gives signs of withering, and one luxuriant branch of industry will die and drop off, others must be pushed into budding." He, the indefatigable count, is not idle. "Faded dames of quality (over all Europe, all creation) have many wants: the count has not studied in the convent laboratory, or pilgrimed to the Count St. Germain, in Westphalia, to no purpose. With loftiest condescension he stoops to impart somewhat of his supernatural secrets--for a _consideration_. Rowland's Kalydor is valuable; but what to the beautifying water of Count Alessandro! He that will undertake to smooth wrinkles, and make withered, green parchment into a fair carnation skin, is he not one whom faded dames of quality will delight to honor? Or, again, let the beautifying-water succeed or