catastrophe is half as melancholy
as Black Hal's. But make haste, or I shall be off to St. Louis. But pray
inform me, what is the subject of your composition?"

"The Origin of Marriage."

"I believe, on my soul," responded I, laughing outright, "you girls
never think about anything else."

I provoked no reply, and the manuscript being unfolded, my sister thus
attempted to elucidate

THE ORIGIN OF MARRIAGE.

Professor Williams having ceased his manipulations, my eyes
involuntarily closed, and I became unconscious to everything occurring
around me. There's truth in mesmerism, after all, thought I, and being
in the clairvoyant state, I beheld a most beautiful comet at this moment
emerging from the constellation Taurus, and describing a curve about the
star Zeta, one of the Pleiades. Now for a trip through infinite space!
and as this thought entered my brain, I grasped a hair in the tail of
the comet as it whizzed by me.

I climbed up the glittering hair until I found myself seated very
comfortably on the comet's back, and was beginning to enjoy my starlit
ramble exceedingly, when I was suddenly aroused from my meditations by
the song of a heavenly minstrel, who, wandering from star to star and
system to system, sang the fate of other worlds and other beings to
those who would listen to his strains and grant him the rites of
hospitality. As I approached, his tones were suddenly changed, his voice
lowered into a deeper key, and gazing intently at me, or at what
evidenced my presence to his sight, thus began:

The flaming sword of the cherub, which had waved so frightfully above
the gate of the garden of Eden, had disappeared; the angel himself was
gone; and Adam, as he approached the spot where so lately he had enjoyed
the delights of heaven, beheld with astonishment and regret that
Paradise and all its splendors had departed from the earth forever.
Where the garden lately bloomed, he could discover only the dark and
smouldering embers of a conflagration; a hard lava had incrusted itself
along the golden walks; the birds were flown, the flowers withered, the
fountains dried up, and desolation brooded over the scene.

"Ah!" sighed the patriarch of men, "where are now the pleasures which I
once enjoyed along these peaceful avenues? Where are all those
beautiful spirits, given by Heaven to watch over and protect me? Each
guardian angel has deserted me, and the rainbow glories of Paradise have
flown. No more the sun