s night, reaches his
far-off home only to find it dark and gloomy, joyless and companionless?
How often has the hard-visaged look of his old butler, as, with sleepy eyes
and yawning face, he hands a bed-room candle, suggested thoughts of married
happiness? Of the perils of propinquity I have already spoken; the risks of
contrast are also great. Have you never, in strolling through some fragrant
and rich conservatory, fixed your eye upon a fair and lovely flower, whose
blossoming beauty seems to give all the lustre and all the incense of
the scene around? And how have you thought it would adorn and grace the
precincts of your home, diffusing fragrance on every side. Alas, the
experiment is not always successful. Much of the charm and many of the
fascinations which delight you are the result of association of time and of
place. The lovely voice, whose tones have spoken to your heart, may, like
some instrument, be delightful in the harmony of the orchestra, but, after
all, prove a very middling performer in a duet.

I say not this to deter men from matrimony, but to warn them from a
miscalculation which may mar their happiness. Flirtation is a very fine
thing, but it's only a state of transition after all. The tadpole existence
of the lover would be great fun, if one was never to become a frog under
the hands of the parson. I say all this dispassionately and advisedly. Like
the poet of my country, for many years of my life,--

"My only books were woman's looks,"

and certainly I subscribe to a circulating library.

All this long digression may perhaps bring the reader to where it brought
me,--the very palpable conviction, that, though not in love with my cousin
Baby, I could not tell when I might eventually become so.

CHAPTER XLVII.

A RECOGNITION.

The most pleasing part about retrospect is the memory of our bygone hopes.
The past, however happy, however blissful, few would wish to live over
again; but who is there that does not long for, does not pine after the
day-dream which gilded the future, which looked ever forward to the time to
come as to a realization of all that was dear to us, lightening our present
cares, soothing our passing sorrows by that one thought?

Life is marked out in periods in which, like stages in a journey, we rest
and repose ourselves, casting a look, now back upon the road we have been
travelling, now throwing a keener glance towards the path left us. It is at
such spots as