is, that my neighbor is actually sinking three or four per cent. upon his capital every year, and must come to beggary unless you can arouse him from his ridiculous castle-building and novel reading. I wish you could see the style in which he moves with his _cara sposa_ to church; they have _come down_, as we say, to an old gig, which cannot be quite as old as Noah's ark, because no two of the kind were ever seen in this world, and therefore could not have been preserved at the time of the Deluge, although the brass mountings on the muddy and rain-stiffened harness are of so antique a fashion, that we might well suppose the ingenuity of that celebrated artificer in brass, Tubal Cain, was employed in their construction. This crazy vehicle is drawn by the overseer's horse, which is borrowed for the "nonce,"--because neither Buck-e-fallus nor Smiler, nor any of the stud are _fit to go_, and Gulliver, besides being a mule, has declined, as I have already shewn, having any thing to do with our "external relations;" and furthermore, because this is the only conceivable mode in which my neighbor can obtain a return for that unlimited control which the said horse exercises over the corn in his corn-house. The contrast between the long lean figure, and rueful and cadaverous countenance of Castellanus, and the short figure resembling "_the fat squab upon a Chinese fan_," and the ruddy countenance of Mrs. Castellanus, is very striking; They sit, side by side, in the gig, sir, as solemn As Marriage and Death in a newspaper column. How they ever came together, except by the fortuitous concourse of atoms, I cannot divine, for certainly without disrespect, I may say, that however charming Mrs. Castellanus may be, she is not A beauty ripe as harvest, Whose skin is whiter than a swan all over, Than silver, snow, or lilies-- nor has she --------------------a soft lip Would tempt you to eternity of kissing, And flesh that melteth in the touch to blood. But we may cease to wonder at their union, when we reflect on the couples we see every day,--so totally dissimilar in taste and external appearance, that we may almost believe with St. Pierre that we love only those who form a contrast to ourselves. "Love," he says, "results only from contrasts, and the greater they are, the more powerful is its energy. I could easily demonstrate this by the evidence of a thousand historical facts. It is well known, for example, to what mad excess of passion that tall and clumsy soldier, Mark Anthony, loved and was beloved by Cleopatra; not the person whom our sculptors represent of a tall, portly, Sabine figure, but the Cleopatra whom historians paint as little, lively and sprightly, carried in disguise about the streets of Alexandria, in the night time, packed up in a parcel of goods on the shoulders of Apollodorus, to keep an assignation with Julius Cæsar."