It may be thought that some disconsolate memory, some affection nipped in the bud, or the like catastrophe, had brought her to this pass. Far from it. She mourned that her fate had been too flat and sterile; that the rapturous emotions of her heart had never been awakened; that no sentimental passion, in short, had ever stirred her soul from its depths. This was the grievance which rankled most in her reveries. To give her her due, she never told it to her husband; but she brooded upon it in secret; and the result was, a multitude of affecting verses, which she treasured in her album as anonymous. Leslie, though none of the wisest of men, was one of the most amiable; and, under his wife's discipline, he learned to be one of the most discreet. It behooved him to be watchful and circumspect. His married life was a voyage through shoals and shallows, and needed sagacious pilotage; for no common eye could see where the danger lay. There was an endless variety of subjects tabooed to him; matters to all appearance quite indifferent, but to which he must never allude, because, Heaven knows how, they touched some trembling susceptibility, or wakened some grievous memory from its blessed sleep. The penalty, if the case were mild, would be a deep-drawn sigh; if more aggravated, a flood of tears; if extreme, an hysteric fit. And if, in his efforts to console her, he ventured to add any thing in the form of remonstrance, or let fall any word which might intimate that her conduct was not quite reasonable, the outraged sufferer would cease weeping, cast up her eyes reproachfully, and murmuring, "O William, is it come to this?" relapse again instantly into the depths of sobbing affliction. It was only by the most abject submission, coupled with all the resources of conjugal eloquence, that Leslie could succeed at length in purchasing a look of resignation and a faint smile of forgiveness. Use, it is said, will blunt the sharpest of troubles. In time, he became acclimated to his fate; yet, on one or two occasions, his equanimity was quite overset. He thought that his wife was losing her wits; for, as he came into her room, she fixed on him a melting gaze, sank on his shoulder, and flooded him with such a freshet of tears, that he might have complained with De Bracy, that a water fiend possessed her. The truth was, she had just been musing on her own dissolution, and imagining, in a luxury of woe, her own funeral, with all the circumstance of that sad event. As she looked around and bethought her how desolate that chamber would be when she was gone, and how each trifle that had once been hers would be treasured by those she left behind, her sensitive heart had dissolved in tenderness, and produced the hydraulic demonstration just mentioned.