, surprised.

"A Papist,--a Catholic!"

"Ah!" he returned, sighing, "once I was _bon Catholique_,--once in my
gone youth; after then I was nothing but the poor man who bats for his
life; now I am of the religion that shelters the stranger and binds up
the broken poor."

Monsieur was a diplomatist. This melted Miss Lucinda's orthodoxy right
down; she only said,--

"Then you will go to church with me?"

"And to the skies above, I pray," said Monsieur, kissing her knotty hand
like a lover.

So in the earliest autumn they were married, Monsieur having previously
presented Miss Lucinda with a delicate plaided gray silk for her wedding
attire, in which she looked almost young; and old Israel was present
at the ceremony, which was briefly performed by Parson Hyde in Miss
Manners's parlor. They did not go to Niagara, nor to Newport; but that
afternoon Monsieur Leclerc brought a hired rockaway to the door, and
took his bride a drive into the country. They stopped beside a pair of
bars, where Monsieur hitched his horse, and, taking Lucinda by the
hand, led her into Farmer Steele's orchard, to the foot of his biggest
apple-tree. There she beheld a little mound, at the head and foot of
which stood a daily rose-bush shedding its latest wreaths of bloom, and
upon the mound itself was laid a board on which she read,

"Here lie the bones of poor Piggy."

Mrs. Lucinda burst into tears, and Monsieur, picking a bud from the
bush, placed it in her hand, and led her tenderly back to the rockaway.

That evening Mrs. Lucinda was telling the affair to old Israel with so
much feeling that she did not perceive at all the odd commotion in his
face, till, as she repeated the epitaph to him, he burst out with,--"He
didn't say what become o' the flesh, did he?"--and therewith fled
through the kitchen-door. For years afterward Israel would entertain a
few favored auditors with his opinion of the matter, screaming till the
tears rolled down his cheeks,--

"That was the beateree of all the weddin'-towers I ever heerd tell on.
Goodness! it's enough to make the Wanderin' Jew die o' larfin'!"

* * * * *

A SOLDIER'S ANCESTRY.

When Nadir asked a princess for his son,
And Delhi's throne required his pedigree,
He stared upon the messenger as one
Who should have known his birth of bravery.

"Go back," he cried, in undissembled scorn,
"And bear this answer to your waiting lord:--
'My c