ever call on you to give it to severer
critics, Aunt Nancy will dress it up for you."

Mr. Arlington in vain sought to excuse himself.

"It is of no use," cried Col. Donaldson; "I am a thoroughbred story
hunter, and now you have shown me the game, I must have it."

To Mr. Arlington, therefore, the reader is indebted for the following
incidents, though I have fulfilled the promise made for me by the
Colonel, and dressed it up a little for its present appearance. I have
called the narrative thus prepared,

"ONLY A MECHANIC."

With beauty, wealth, an accomplished education, and a home around which
clustered all the warm affections and graceful amenities of life, Lilian
Devoe was considered by her acquaintances as one of fortune's most
favored children. Yet in Lilian's bright sky there was a cloud, though
it was perceptible to none but herself. She was the daughter of an
Englishman, who, on his arrival in America with a sickly wife and infant
child, had esteemed himself fortunate in obtaining the situation of
farm-steward, or bailiff, at Mr. Trevanion's country-seat, near
New-York.

"This is a pleasant home, Gerald," said Mrs. Devoe, on the day she took
possession of her small but neat cottage, as she stood with him beneath
a porch embowered with honey-suckle, and looked out upon a scene to
which hill and dale and river combined to give enchantment.

"If you can be well and happy in it, love, I will try and forget that I
had a right to a better," said Gerald Devoe, with a grave yet tender
smile, as he drew his invalid wife close to his side.

Grave, Gerald Devoe always was; and none wondered at it who knew his
early history. His family belonged to the gentry of England, and he had
been born to an inheritance sufficient to support him respectably in
that class. His mother, from whom he derived a sound judgment, and a
firm and vigorous mind, died while he was yet a child, leaving his weak
and self-indulgent father to the management of a roguish attorney, by
whose aid he made the future maintain the present, till, at his death,
little was left to Gerald beyond the bare walls of his paternal home and
the small park by which it was surrounded. He had been, for two years
before this time, married to one who had brought him little wealth, and
whose delicate health seemed to demand the luxuries which he could no
longer afford. For her sake, far more than for his own--even more than
for that of his cherished child--he sh