"Sweet,"--"charming,"--"fascinating,"--were the least of the adjectives lavished on the interesting bride. Some of his lady acquaintance felicitated him that he had espoused an angel, an embodied beatitude not more than half pertaining to this world. In fact, there was a certain aerial grace in her movements, a certain translucency in her small alabaster features, which might countenance such a notion. The winning smile, too, with which she met her visitors on her reception Thursdays, savored wholly of the angelic. She breathed courtesies around her as the beneficent royalty of Naples scatters sugar plums among his loving subjects at the carnival, and, on the next day, sends them to prison by the cart load. The tyranny of the strong is bad enough; but the tyranny of the weak is intolerable; and this latter visitation came upon Leslie in its most rueful form--that, namely, whose weapons are sobs, sighs, vapors, and the dire coercion of hysteric fits. He was a soft-hearted fool, and a fair subject for such oppression. Not that his newly-installed mistress--his mistress, since she made him her slave--was naturally of an ill temper. On the contrary, she was somewhat amiable, or, at least, much given to tears and tenderness; but in process of time, this profuse sensibility had all centred on herself. In short, she was profoundly selfish, though nothing could have astonished her more than to tell her so; for, in her own eyes, she seemed a miracle of sensibility, as indeed she was, though her sensibility had learned to give little response to any woes but her own. What these woes might be would be hard to say: she had a wonderful talent for finding and inventing grievances. She was submerged and drowned in a sentimental melancholy, which wore in turn ten thousand different aspects, each worse than the other. She was a sea-anemone, covered with a myriad of filaments, all more shrinking and sensitive than a snail's horns. One reads of famished wretches who have tried to nourish life from the current of their own veins. So, in a figurative sense, did she. She was always anatomizing her own ridiculous heart; groping among the depths of her own sickly fancies, and making them her daily food. She was a busy gatherer of tokens, souvenirs, and mementoes, and was beset with blighted hopes, vain longings, sad remembrances, and all the spectral ills engendered between a frail mind and a depraved stomach. She was a great reader, and floated rudderless through a sea of books, fishing out of it all that was tender, morbid, and despairing, and stowing it up in albums.