unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very
seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a
certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender
womanhood shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other,
our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable
moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an
outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder
whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married
to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride,
since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he
ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the
matrimonial bond cannot be held to include the three-fourths of the wife
that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? And as a matter
of conscience and good morals, ought not an English married pair to
insist upon the celebration of a Silver Wedding at the end of
twenty-five years, in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that
corporeal growth of which both parties have individually come into
possession since they were pronounced one flesh?

The chief enjoyment of my several visits to Leamington lay in rural
walks about the neighborhood, and in jaunts to places of note and
interest, which are particularly abundant in that region. The high-roads
are made pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often
afford him the hospitality of a wayside-bench beneath a comfortable
shade. But a fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go
wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad
fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of
thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills,
streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet
strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in
his idyls and eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very
heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of
intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him; for,
with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property of the
public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older tenure. Their
antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways; the footsteps of the
aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass, and th