ain of gloomy reveries. She was never out
of humour, never out of spirits,--always brilliant, sparkling, and
happy-minded.

What a glorious thing to obtain a share of such a nature,--the very next
best thing to having it oneself! "But all this was not Love," breaks in
my impatient reader. Very true; I admit it in all humility. It was not
what you, nor perhaps I, would call by that name; but yet it was all
that Annesley Beecher had to offer in that regard.

Have you never remarked the strange and curious efforts made by men who
have long lived on narrow fortunes to acquit themselves respectably on
succeeding to larger means? They know well enough that they need not
pinch and screw and squeeze any longer,--that fortune has enlarged her
boundaries, and that they can enter into wider, richer, and pleasanter
pasturage,--and yet, for the life of them, they cannot make the venture!
or if they do, it is with a sort of convulsive, spasmodic effort far
more painful than pleasurable. Their old instincts press heavily upon
them, and bear down all the promptings of their present prosperity; they
really do not want all these bounties of fate,--they are half crashed
by the shower of blessings. So is it precisely with your selfish man in
his endeavors to expand into affection, and so was it with Beecher when
he tried to be a lover.

Some moralists tell us that, even in the best natures, love is
essentially a selfish passion. What amount of egotism, then, does it not
include in those who are far--very far--from being "the best"? With all
this, let us be just to poor Beecher. Whatever there was of heart
about him, she _had_ touched; whatever of good or kind or gentle in his
neglected being existed, she had found the way to it. If he were capable
of being anything better, she alone could have aided the reformation.
If he were not to sink still lower and lower, it was to her helping hand
his rescue would be owing. And somehow--though I cannot explain how--he
felt and knew this to be the case. He could hear generous sentiments
from _her_, and not deem them hypocrisy. He could listen to words of
trust and hopefulness, and yet not smile at her credulity. _She_ had
gained that amount of ascendancy over his mind which subjugated all
his own prejudices to her influence, and, like all weak natures, he was
never so happy as in slavery. Last of all, what a prize it would be
to be the husband of the most beautiful woman in Europe! There was a
not