young men, companions in all those acts of religious fellowship which renders Christianity so true a nurse of the nobler affections. And yet no two persons could be less similar in the original structure of their minds. Dallas was gentle-tempered and imaginative, and imbued, through a nature decidedly intellectual, with a love of study for its own sake. His friend, on the contrary, was of a bold energetic temperament, and a plain, practical understanding, which he had cultivated rather from a sense of duty than under the influence of any direct pleasure derived in the process. But it is probable that had they resembled one another more closely, they would have loved one another less. Friendship, if I may venture the metaphor, is a sort of ball-and-socket connexion. It seems to be a first principle in its economy that its agreements should be founded in dissimilarity--the stronger with the weaker--the softer with the more rugged. And perhaps, in looking round to convince ourselves of the fact, we have but to note how the sexes--formed for each other by God himself--have been created, not after a similar, but after a diverse pattern--and that their natures piece together, not because they were made to resemble, but to correspond with each other. The friends were often together; the huge old castle, grey with the lichens of a thousand years, towered on its wooded eminence immediately over the town; and the little antique manse, with its narrow serrated gables, and with the triangular tablets of its upper windows, rising high in the roof, occupied, nest-like, an umbrageous recess so directly below, that the chaplain in his turret was scarcely a hundred yards distant from the minister in his study. There hardly passed a day in which Dallas did not spend an hour or two in the manse; at times speculating on some abstruse scholastic question with his friend the clergyman, whom he generally found somewhat less than his match on such occasions; at times still more pleasingly engaged in conversing, though on somewhat humbler terms, with his friend’s only sister. Mary Anderson was a sylph-looking young creature, rather below the middle size, and slightly though finely formed. Her complexion, which was pale and singularly transparent, indicated no great strength of constitution; but there was an easy grace in all her motions, that no one could associate with the weakness of positive indisposition, and an expression in her bright speaking eyes and beautiful forehead, that impressed all who knew her rather with the idea of an active and powerful spirit than of a delicate or feeble frame. There was an unpretending quietness in her manners, and a simple good sense in all she said and did on ordinary occasions, that seemed to be as much the result of correct feeling as of a discriminating intellect; but there were depths in the character beyond the reach of the ordinary observer--powers of abstract thought which only a superior mind could