fashionable arrivals ! Or, if you long for a
uniform, the books of the Foreign Legion are
not closed.

A WIFE'S STORY.

IN SEVEN CHAPTERS. CHAPTER IV.

"I HAVE brought home Gower to spend the
evening," Harold said, one day, soon after our
return home. " I thought you would like it.
He is fond of music and poetry, and all that
sort of thing; so I thought you would get on
well together."

I thought Harold showed a bitter
remembrance of those words of mine — I had never
forgotten them — in this speech.

"I do not want—" I began; but Mr. Gower
was now in the room; it was necessary to
receive him civilly.

'Do not want any interruption to your
tête-à-tête evenings, Mrs. Warden ? But you
must be generous. Remember how long it is
since I have had the pleasure of seeing you,
or my friend, Harold. Since the evening
when yon surprised us all so brilliantly, you
have been invisible. I hope," he continued,
"you will give me credit for having been
sincerely sorry to hear of your subsequent
illness. I trust sea-air has quite restored
you."

"I am very well now, thank you," I
replied. Of course, Mr. Gower could not know
the pain his words gave me.

"We have been staying at Seawash,"
Harold said. " Do you know it at all, Gower ?
It is very pleasant there. My wife fell quite
in love with it, so we shall often go down
there, again, I think."

"It has a very broken coast, has it not?
the sea running up into many small bays, and
lashing itself furiously against rocky points?
I know it well. One autumn some years ago,
I was there alone. You know the Devil's
Tongue, as they call the longest sharpest
point, I dare say, Mrs. Warden ? "

"Yes, I do."

"I was returning from a long ramble late
one wild evening, and saw the sea — it was
very rough, — breaking magnificently on the
rock at the end. I went down, although it
was growing dusk, and mounted to the top of
the little peak. I was not much above the
water, I could see no land; it was awfully
beautiful to see from that wild point of view
the heaving and breaking, meeting and dashing
of the great, foamy, angry waves. I am
a man of tolerable nerve and courage, but I
felt an icy thrill pass through me; it was some
time before my heart returned to its regular,
quiet beating. Each wave that came whelming
the rock at my feet, seemed as if it might
swell up and wash me from my little
pinnacle, and as if it hungered to do so. One
reads of angry, foamy, troubled seas, but no
words that I know can express the fearful
excitement roused within one, standing in
the midst of such wild commotion. There was
an order in the wild going of the waves, too.
I observed how, first, the waters on one side
gathered themselves together and came
rolling on, swift, and fell as fate, only to be met,
scattered and broken, by the great army of
waters tumbling on from the other side
What a pigmy I felt standing there! Yet
I would not, for much, have missed the
experience of the hour I spent there. The sky
was almost as wild as the sea, only along the
horizon there was a line of gleamy, watery
light, and between sky and sea I was
shut in ! "

Some fascination made me raise my eyes
from my work to Mr. Gower's kindled face ;
but I dropped them Immediately, and did not
speak.

"Did you get home safe? " Harold asked.
"From the Devil's Tongue; people
sometimes— "

"Pass into Hell's Throat. Excuse my
interruption, I was afraid you might mar, by more
genteelly expressing the idea, of the nature
of the transition. That boiling, surging world
of waters gave birth to the idea in my mind.
Yes, I got home safe, but not without a little
further experience; when I turned and
descended from my slight elevation, I saw water
before me still; the tide had come up and
covered the narrow and lower neck of land
along which I had approached the end. I tried
it cautiously, and was nearly washed away. I
had no desire unhousel'd, disappointed,
unanel'd, and with all my imperfections on
my head, to lose sight of known life to try
some unknown, perchance greater ill, so I
gave up the attempt to traverse that wave-
washed strip of land."

"What did you do?" Harold asked.

"Do, man! Just nothing. I went back
to my former station, wrapped myself up
tight in my cloak, and waited. Waiting is a
famous cure for the ills of this life, Mrs.
Warden."

"Did you know that you were safe there
on the point?"

"When it was full moon and the sea
roughened by a sou'-wester, that point was
sometimes washed over, an old boatman
had told me, as we rowed past it the day
before. I don't pretend to say but that I
waited and watched the waters in great
anxiety. Sometimes a slight lull in the storm
came, and every wave reached less high than
the former had done. Then, with a howl
and a scream, the wind rushed across the
water, and huge billows would leap, and well,
and gurgle up, sometimes over my feet,
always drenching me with spray!"

"Well! chacun à son gout! You call that
experience which you would not have missed
for the world ? I cannot understand that.
Can you imagine the feeling, Annie?"

I worked away diligently with a quivering
hand, and answered absently, without looking
up, " I do not know."

"Capital fish you get at that same place,"