r should have mentioned but for the young
lady's reply.

"Those hoods!" she said--"WE CALL THOSE HOODS UGLIES! Captain Hicks."

Oh, how pretty she looked as she said it! The blue eyes looked up under
the blue hood, so archly and gayly; ever so many dimples began playing
about her face; her little voice rang so fresh and sweet, that a heart
which has never loved a tree or flower but the vegetable in question
was sure to perish--a heart worn down and sickened by repeated
disappointment, mockery, faithlessness--a heart whereof despair is an
accustomed tenant, and in whose desolate and lonely depths dwells an
abiding gloom, began to throb once more--began to beckon Hope from the
window--began to admit sunshine--began to--O Folly, Folly! O Fanny!
O Miss K., how lovely you looked as you said, "We call those hoods
Uglies!" Ugly indeed!

This is a chronicle of feelings and characters, not of events and
places, so much. All this time our vessel was making rapid way up the
river, and we saw before us the slim towers of the noble cathedral of
Antwerp soaring in the rosy sunshine. Lankin and I had agreed to go to
the "Grand Laboureur," or the Place de Meir. They give you a particular
kind of jam-tarts there--called Nun's tarts, I think--that I remember,
these twenty years, as the very best tarts--as good as the tarts
which we ate when we were boys. The "Laboureur" is a dear old quiet
comfortable hotel; and there is no man in England who likes a good
dinner better than Lankin.

"What hotel do you go to?" I asked of Lady Kicklebury.

"We go to the 'Saint Antoine' of course. Everybody goes to the 'Saint
Antoine,'" her ladyship said. "We propose to rest here; to do the
Rubens's; and to proceed to Cologne to-morrow. Horace, call Finch and
Bowman; and your courier, if he will have the condescension to wait upon
ME, will perhaps look to the baggage."

"I think, Lankin," said I, "as everybody seems going to the 'Saint
Antoine,' we may as well go, and not spoil the party."

"I think I'll go too," says Hicks; as if HE belonged to the party.

And oh, it was a great sight when we landed, and at every place at which
we paused afterwards, to see Hirsch over the Kicklebury baggage, and
hear his polyglot maledictions at the porters! If a man sometimes feels
sad and lonely at his bachelor condition, if SOME feelings of envy
pervade his heart, at seeing beauty on another's arm, and kind eyes
directed towards a happier mug than his own--at