have to be taken into some sort of account. People, in discussing their matrimonial prospects, seem rather apt to ignore the claims of duty in preference to those of self-indulgence and self-interest. But man and wife ought never to reckon on being able to live entirely to themselves. We have a perfect right to study our own comfort, but we must not quite forget the interests of others-even those of generations yet unborn. Nobody, for instance, is really justified in marrying on such slender means or to put it quite, or nearly, out of his power to provide for children, as to give them a fair chance of earning a livelihood. Unfortunately it is too much the received opinion that so long as a man in marrying can gain some immediate personal advantage, moral or material, it matters little whether the ultimate consequences to others be gcod or evil.

If young persons of limited means really want to lower the expenses of married life, they may do much by getting rid of some of the exaggerated respect that we are all of us too prone to entertain for certain conventional usages, for the minor idiosyncracies of some particular phase of society. Half the troubles and difficulties of beginners are the result of ill-judged attempts to live up to some imaginary right standard of manners. We should only be following the example of our betters if we were to enlarge on the wrongheadedness of young persons, who first contract simple marriages of affection, and then try to assume at starting the ground to which the parents of one or both families attained only after the toil of many years, or from exceptional worldly advantages. Legion surely is the name of those who have set off at the rate of a thousand a year, when their real income was barely half that sum.

But even in the humbler paths of society we meet with conduct of much the same sort. A clerk, with a small income, married to a girl as poor as himself, takes a house at a comparatively high rent, merely to make an impression on the minds of his acquaintance. Or he engages a servant-one of the "drab" genus-at wages that may be thought exorbitant, considering that she does little but get in the way, and break nearly every thing she sets hands on. How gladly would husband and wife do all that wants doing, for themselves! If they could carry out their wish, what a saving it would be to them! But then consider the neighbours!

We have taken an extreme instance, but a similar influence is at work in higher ranks of life. The clerk ties a millstone round his neck in the shape of a servant, whom he could do better without, but whose maintenance he thinks essential to his respectability. The young barrister gets himself sadly in arrears through his modest dinner parties, his wife's brougham, or an indispensable boy in buttons—all luxuries indulged in not from recklessness, but from

an honest, though mistaken, idea of "living up to" some vague "position in society." Living "up to" its mark; not living beyond it, though this is generally the result.

If the young barrister could find it in his heart to dispense with certain luxuries, mistaken for necessities, merely because in common use with more prosperous members of his own class; if the clerk could resolve to forego certain doubtful advantages, thought indispensable merely because a part of " clerical" households in general; both would be able to live quite as comfortably at a much lower rate, and with less real risk of losing caste in the eyes of their neighbours. Young couples at starting are, as a rule, overburdened with false shame. If they could manage to throw a good deal of it overboard, and to see some fancied necessities in their true light of unjustifiable luxuries, they might be able to make married life a success, on means that would otherwise entail beggary, or bebarely sufficient to keep up that melancholy domestic phenomenon, a "scramble for existence."

THE TWO MAIDENS.

YOUNG Love went offering kisses
To Evangeline and Maude,
Two comely-looking misses,

Whom by chance he spied abroad.

Spake Evangeline, deep blushing,
"I'll have no kiss from thee;"
"Gentle youth," said Maude, scarce flushing,
"Neither any bring to me."

Then he smiled, the pert offender,
As he passed the maiden by,
Love-sick for Maude so tender,
And Evangeline so shy.

Once again he met those misses,

Singly forth each maiden came;

When he forward sprang to kiss them,

Neither maid disdained the same.

F. U. R.

IN the middle of December, 1799, Parker and Alice Masters sat together before a blazing fire in the drawing-room at Uplands.

The day was very cold, and the snow fell in swift white flakes, just as it fell that awful night almost three years ago, when Masters walked away across the sheeted common with blood upon his hands.

"It's a dreadful bitter day," Parker observed, by way of opening e conference he came upon, while he stared at the snow drifting past the window.

Alice glanced round involuntarily, and shuddered.

"I hate the snow," she said, turning her head away, and setting her face towards the fire, at which she stared for a moment in abstracted silence; then glancing up, with her dark eyes full on Parker's face, she asked, "When am I to see Masters?"

There was some gold lying loose in her lap, some of those paltry instalments which Masters continued to send her through Parker from time to time; she took the money up in her fingers, and threw it down again, guinea by guinea.

"Masters has a good deal of business on hand now," Parker said, apologetically.

"Indeed!" she answered, with slow scorn. "Well, as you know so much about his affairs, perhaps you can tell me when I must

leave Uplands."

"Leave Uplands!" he repeated after her.

"Yes; I suppose you know my husband has sold it, and that I am here on sufferance."

Yes," he said, "I know he has sold it, but the gentleman who bought it, would be the last man on earth to disturb a lady."

She sat upright, proud and still, her luminous eyes alight.

VOL. VII.

31