e portion of the love that united them in youth may still be
witnessed in these old couples. Each has lost every trace of the
comeliness that first attracted them to each other; but they remember
what they were, and memory, gilding the past, shews each to the other,
not as they actually are, but as they were many a long year ago. No
face, however fair,--not even the blooming one of their favourite
granddaughter, seems so lovely to the uxorious old husband as the one
he remembers to have been so proud of forty years ago, and which still
beams on him with an expression of tenderness that reminds him of its
former beauty. And she, too, with what complacency does she listen to
his oft-repealed reminiscences of her youthful attractions, and how
dear is the bond that still unites them!

Plain and uninteresting in the eyes of others, they present only the
aspect of age; alas! never lovely: but in them at least other gleams of
past good looks recall the past, when each considered the other
peerless, though now they alone remember that "such things were, and
were most sweet."

Their youth and their maturity have been passed together; their joys
and their sorrows have been shared, and they are advancing hand in hand
towards that rapid descent in the mountain of life, at whose base is
the grave, hoping that in death they may not be divided.

Who can look at those old couples, and not feel impressed with the
sanctity and blessedness of marriage, which, binding two destinies in
one, giving the same interests and the same objects of affection to
both, secures for each a companionship and a consolation for those days
which must come to all, when, fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, the
society of the young and gay can no longer charm them, and the present
requires the recollections of the past to render it less cheerless;
recollections only to be found in those who have grown old together?

Yonder old man, leaning on the arm of a middle-aged woman, who seems
less like his housekeeper than his domestic tyrant, offers an example
of the fate of those who have lived in what is commonly called a state
of single blessedness. A youth and maturity of pleasure have been
followed by an old age of infirmity.

He had a thousand pleasantries ready to utter on the subject of
marriage whenever it was mentioned; could cite endless examples of
unhappy couples (forgetting to name a single one of the happy); and
laughed and shook his head as he d