he has to turn out of doors when he is feeling very sentimental, and the night breezes strike chilly. I supported home such an unfortunate man the other night. It was a mauvais quart d'heure. It was frightfully late when I left him at an episcopal abode, and he told me that he had been obliged to sustain his spirits all day by calling in artificial assistance. He gets very restless, and only that the best man is sleepy and won't smoke any longer, he would probably outwatch the stars to make sure of the rendezvous. As a general rule, he will turn up in the church at the time fixed. He and his friends creep in after a somewhat obscure and inglorious fashion, compared with the brilliancy of the bride's array. Sometimes the bridegroom does not turn up. I have quite a small collection of cases in which that striking incident has occurred. On one occasion the discarded bride tore up her beautiful dress from top to bottom. Ofttimes, however, the philosophical remark is made that it is a lucky escape. I think the knout ought to be given to all jilters, with Siberia superadded to all such jilters as these. Looking at a nursery book the other day, I saw these absurd lines:

The bride of course fainted, for she was acquainted

With manners, and knew what was right;

But quickly they brought her some brandy and water,

And that soon recovered her
quite.

All the congratulations, signings, smilings, kisses over, and presently we are wandering on the lawn, waiting for the summons to the breakfast-table. In town you may do these things by contracthalf-a-guinea a head, with or without wine-but in the country all has been planned and provided against weeks and months before

hand. The wedding cake is a work of art which excited quite a sensation in the local mind, and has been exhibited a week before in our provincial capital. Then all our kind neighbours have rifled their vineries and conservatories of their choicest contents, and the appearance of things rivals that of a great flower and fruit show, without the agonizing reflection that you are only to look and not to touch or taste. Then the bridesmaids are beginning to avail themselves of their special privilege of flirtation; and I am not sure that amid the recent general osculation some surreptitious kisses were not introduced. One or two gentlemen are rather nervous, as they have to be speechifyers, and there is a feeling of impending failure on them. Under these delightful circumstances, however, a failure is hardly at all less successful than a success. The bridegroom, however, takes this part of the matter pretty coolly; howbeit that it will be recollected for years to come what he said and how she looked on this momentous occasion. He feels that he has secured the chief object of his endeavours, and any other success is a very minor kind of matter. Not so the young gentleman who has to propose 'The Bridesmaids,' and hopes to earn what the Irishman called a temporary immortality in their beaux yeux. The speech of Paterfamilias is sure to have a touch of genuine pathos; and the tearful eyes of that placens uxor have their own eloquence. Ten to one but she has been repeating to herself that wisest of adages: 'My son is my son till he gets him a wife, but my daughter's my daughter all the days of my life.' They can recall all the lives of the young people through childhood and youth to this hour, and it is easy to their imagination to picture

their future life till they come to their own grey hairs. I am not surprised, then, that there are some people to whom the wedding breakfast has its tinge of melancholy. But they are in a decided minority. Now begins the mimic fusillade of the corks. Now the explosive crackers go off, and the idiotic mottoes are read, into which some simpering juveniles try to impart a deep meaning of their own. Now the bride takes the silver knife, and, with an heroic plunge, begins to divide the wedding-cake. All the healths have been drunk. The father has honestly said that his girl has been a good girl all her days, and will prove herself a good wife. The bridegroom has made his honest, sincere, manly speech, which has under hopeful skies confirmed every golden opinion. The young gentleman who has proposed the bridesmaids has done it so brilliantly, he might propose to any one of them on the spot with every probability of being instantaneously accepted. The old friend of the family has not been forgotten. The doctor, who took the bride through her juvenile measles, has been feelingly remembered. An excuse has been found for every one proposing the health of every one on public or private grounds -so we can hardly be blamed if we think ourselves the most meritorious set of beings in the kingdom. There are half-a-dozen bottles of Moet in the kitchen. There are to be tea and buns, beer and beef through the parish. Such is the idea, properly speaking, of the Wedding Breakfast.

I suppose there is no better poetry of the wedding breakfast than that bright, cheerful burst of poetry that follows the solemn organ service of 'In Memoriam.' The bride was the Laureate's own sister, the wife of Edmund Law

But where is she, the bridal flower

That must be made a wife ere noon? She enters, glowing like the moon Of Eden on its bridal bower. O happy hour, and happier hours

Await them. Many a merry face Salutes them-maidens of the place, That pelt us in the porch with flowers. Let all my genial spirits advance

To meet and greet a whiter sun; My drooping memory will not shun The foaming grape of Eastern France. It circles round, and fancy plays,

And hearts are warmed and faces bloom,
As drinking health to bride and groom,
We wish them store of happy days.
But they must go; the time draws on,
And those white-favour'd horses wait;
They rise, but linger; it is late;
Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.
A shade falls on us like the dark

From little cloudlets on the grass,
But sweeps away as on we pass
To range the woods, to roam the park,
Discussing how their courtship grew,

And talk of others that are wed,
And how she looked, and what he said,
And back we come at fall of dew.
Again the feast, the speech, the glee,

The shade of passing thought,the wealth Of words and wit, the double health, The crowning cup, the three-times-three.

But these glories don't last. The light of common day sets in, and the brilliant colour goes off. The process of disillusionation commences at the railway station. Is it possible that this quiet pair in travelling costume can be the hero and heroine of that brilliant scene? The bridegroom might learn a lesson on the transitory nature of all human glory. In the days to come he is dwindling from the heroic stature to the common height. As they go off the scene,

we fling good luck's old shoe after them. I hope it will not frighten the horses, as it did the other day with most disastrous effect, and caused quite a thrill of sympathy in gentle bosoms throughout the country. Neither, I hope, will there be another kind of accident: as when, at the last moment, it was discovered that the young people had been married without a licence, and it was settled that everything must be considered as undone, except, I suppose, the wedding breakfast, and to be done over again-it was not mentioned whether the wedding breakfast should be included. I always make a point of visiting my young people a year or two afterwards. They have generally toned down. Their

ménage is always pretty, though perhaps with some marks of inexperience. They have entered upon a new cycle of loves and interests, and there is always the inevitable baby. But they look fondly back on that wedding. There is the photograph of the whole group as they stood that happy morning on the lawn with the background of the roses trellised about the old home. There is the splendid array of wedding presents that went some way towards setting up the young people in life. And, above all, there is that store of sweet recollections that links the garnered inheritance of the past with the stories of the present, and builds up that family life which is the strength and beauty of our land.

HE

He

E was walking in the Burlington Arcade. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. He paused to contemplate his imperfections in one of those lengthy mirrors that adorn the pilasters between the shops. was scarcely satisfied with the result. He might be eight and thirty. He was exceedingly handsome. But one indication of approaching age marred his redolent beauty, and this was his very grey hair. For my part, I thought it improved him: but then the hair did not happen to be mine; and, consequently, I was not a judge. Whether the hair in itself was an ornament, from its grey disposition, or not, was less a question to my friend than the age which the colour disclosed. And as of course I could not possibly tell what age he might wish to appear, I was only a judge of the colour, from my point of view, not his. One thing, at least, was certain-that, whatever the colour of the hair, it adorned a head and countenance which were strikingly serene and fine. Not strictly, perhaps, intellectual; not the head of a Newton or a Locke; but the pledge of distinctive character, with largeness of soul, if not mind. The head was a head which said-and the countenance said the same thing'I think; but not to great purpose. I have the highest ambition to be something great, but not the force to achieve it.

I

aspire to ideas beyond the reach of any one, and therefore necessarily of myself. I have the finest conceptions of the infinitely Should-Be; but my achievements are abnormally normal. In short, I am a man of theory, with just nine hundred a year.'

Such a man was Algernon Stapleton.

He united the weak and the strong to a point that was absolutely typical. At breakfast he would originate the most splendid ideas, which by dinner he had totally forgotten. He would begin a book on some giant subject, and write the first page or preface, but the effort so exhausted his fund of power that completion was out of the question. He would plan a method for relieving the poor from every hardship and wrong; but he worked out the method as he walked to his tailor, and it ended in his ordering a coat. He would arrive at the conclusion that a lucid intellect depends on ascetic life; but he encouraged the view over a bottle of champagne, and woke next morning with a headache. Thus it will be seen that, though a superior man, he was eminently wanting in ballast. And this is, perhaps, that popular want which is suggested by the Burlington Arcade.

I joined my friend Stapleton on this pregnant morning; but first I watched him, from afar, as he gazed into the mirror, adoring.

(The reader will have noticed, in the Burlington Arcade, a popular weakness which pervades the loungers, to look at themselves in the mirrors.) Possibly, however, he might be saying to himself, 'Mon Dieu, comme je me regrette!' Whichever it was, he stood long. Bewailment or pleasure was distinctly spun out beyond the limits of taste. He might vastly admire his elegant form: if so, that concerned but himself. He might pro foundly deplore the freckings of age: if so, the public would not care for it. The occupation of pondering oneself in a mirror, though adapted to the interior closet, is quite unfitted to an arcade and many persons obviously thought so while passing poor Stapleton on the Walk.

I stood to contemplate. I was anxious to see how long human vanity-or, let us put it, human regrets-could keep a man staring into a mirror in the middle of the Burlington Arcade. Vanity, we know, is the master passion of most of the greatest of men: but vanity that advertises itself in a mirror is an error in tactic and taste.

Presently, while still he was wrapped in self-depreciation or praise, there peered beside him, into the mirror, a very beautiful girl. She was exactly seventeen years old. (I knew it) She

smiled with exquisite sweetness, with adolescent play and innocence, as she contemplated the glass-or him. She looked into Stapleton's face. She said to him by her eyes, by her smile, and light, 'O vain, but handsome man!' Stapleton caught the observation. He read it in the syllables of the face. Imaged and writ on that lovely countenance, those words were very quill-penned.

He turned, to look. As he did

so the face moved away; and, joining a lady of more mature years, the girl remarked to her friend, 'What a remarkably handsome man that must have been-before his hair turned grey.'

II.

Stapleton heard that remark. I was standing, perhaps, three yards from him, just as the words were uttered.

I was anxious that he should not suspect that I had been the spectator of his folly. My conscience smote me for not having abbreviated the period of his reckless advertisement. I ought to have stopped him from publishing to the world the fact that he was so human. He might, perhaps, be doing what many would have done had they had the courage to be silly: but vanity hides vanity with the vainest of veils; which, indeed, is the vainest part of all.

I

Now here I have a remark to make, which I am sure the reader will pardon. was desperately in love myself. Moreover, I was in love with the very young lady who had made this comment on Stapleton. I had met her at an evening party just one month before. I too well remembered her. Alas! she had forgotten me. The reader will therefore acutely appreciate my own very painful sensibilities. Had she deigned to admire me, as I peered into the mirror, reflecting, it is certain I should have easily forgiven her: but nothing can be more galling, in love, than to hear another admired.

Stapleton, when he heard her remark, stood for a moment mute. He seemed lost in the tremendous power of the flattery plus the reproach. Then, giving utterance to the terrible echo which came