family, and limited income.

How far more

usefully and happily employed for herself and others were those refined tastes, and those superior qualifications, though thus adapted, like the beautiful plants and products of the foreign climes, to the common uses and necessities of mankind, than if suffered to expand and expend themselves upon the leafless desert, in selfish, listless, idle inefficiency, often preying morbidly on their own resources for lack of legitimate exercise or healthful outlet-those very tastes and qualifications, proving oftener a curse and a reproach, than a blessing and an ornament to their possessor. For woman's strength and honour lie in her heart, in her affections, in the duties which from them devolve; if she lean upon her own understanding, trusts to the resources of her mind, or intellect, she leans on a broken reed, she makes for herself broken cisterns which can hold no water.

Selina Seaham, the third daughter, and the beauty of the family, only one year before the marriage celebrated on the day in question, consulted the inclinations of her own heart, rather than the prudent wishes of her friends, and gave her hand to an officer, who had immediately after left England to join his regiment in India with his bride; and then the two younger sisters had remained together at Glan Pennant, without any seeming prospect of such speedy disseverment as had since occurred, till some months after, Sir Hugh Morgan, the great man of those parts, to the astonishment of all, proposed to the youngest Miss Seaham and was accepted; he being her senior by some five-and-twenty years. And though he had ever been on very intimate and friendly terms with the family, had not shown any tendency that way since the time, when, on the Seahams first coming to settle in the neighbourhood, after their father's death-Mr. Seaham having absented

himself from Glan Pennant for some years, for the education of his daughters-Sir Hugh Morgan made an offer of his hand to the eldest daughter, and finding himself at fault, she being engaged at the very time to Lord Everingham, oddly overlooked the precedence of the genius and the beauty amongst the sisters, and transferred his offer of a place in his hard-named pedigree to the startled Mary, then a girl of scarcely seventeen. But though a man of much honest worth, not to speak of the worldly recommendations of the match, the proposal produced no effect upon the mind of the unambitious maiden, but surprise and repugnance.

"And she refused him, though her aunt did say,
'Twas an advantage she had thrown away.
(He an advantage!) That she'd live to rue it."

Whether or not, she had reason for repentance on this score, may cause, amongst those who follow her future history a difference of

opinion.

But certain it is, that with not a pang of envious regret on her own account, had she seen her young and blooming sister, Agnes, give her hand that morning, five years after the event of her refusal to the same excellent man, the only disagreeable feeling the occasion excited in her mind being, the difficulty of reconciling herself to the idea, that her dear, pretty, young sister Aggy, should so cheerfully acquiesce in a fate which had once raised in her own mind such unqualified disinclination.

But then she was the only individual in the world, who did not think the fair bride the luckiest creature in the world, and the wisest.

"Who but a fool like me, they think, no doubt," mused Mary Seaham, with a humble sigh, "would have rejected such an advantage as they seem to consider it. True, I was only seventeen at the time,

at twenty-one ? to-night's well shown forth." And

but am I wiser experience has

she remembered

a certain fable which had composed a portion of her childhood's lessons, 'The dog and the shadow,' and smiled in very scorn and derision at her own puerility.

But alas! there are shadows which our wild and wilful imaginations have conjured up which, scorn and deride them as we may, are destined to cast a darkening influence on our future destinies.

"Our fatal shadows that walk by us still;"

to become, in fact, a substance-a realityfrom which we would often fain be able to awake and say: it was a dream.

"Grant us not the ill we ask-in very love refuse— That which we know, our weakness would abuse."

But it is as well, perhaps, to retrograde, in order to relate the incident which some years ago had cast its beguiling shadows upon the pure stream of our heroine's young existence.