Even as the Jewell' d glass is raised,
      The deep dark eyes I held so dear
    Look into mine! There comes a voice,
      The well-known voice I used to hear!
    O poet! it was truth you sang:
      No luxury yet could ever buy
    One draught from Lethe's fabled stream,
      " For love and sorrow never die!"

THE LUCKY LEG.

"WHAT unaccountable things people do in
the way of marrying! " I said to four or
five of the ladies belonging to our chapel,
who had met at the minister's house, to
form a sort of supplementary Dorcas meeting;
and, as there were so few of us, we
considered it unnecessary to attend to the
rule for appointing a reader, and forbidding
gossip; a rule which considerably lessened
the interest and popularity of our meetings.

The only single lady among us looked up
upon hearing my remark, and dropping her
work, as if for a long speech, began:

"What you said is very true: I do think
the conduct of people at other times really
sensible, during their engagements, and in
their choice of husbands or wives, to be the
most incomprehensible and contradictory of
all human actions. If a woman has a decided
prejudice she is certain to act in direct
opposition to it. Last spring I was at a
wedding of one of my cousins—you remember
her, Mrs. Turner, she was over here two
or three autumns ago—and, being a High
Church woman, she would not so much as put
her foot inside our chapel. She is a fine
majestic-looking girl, and has taken lessons in
Deportment, so that it is quite imposing to
see her enter a room, or sail down the street;
she used to vow she would never marry a
little man, a draper, or a dissenter; and now
she has just married a very small abject-looking
draper , who is such a rabid Methodist,
that he will preach, though he has to stand
on two bosses to raise his head sufficiently
above the panels of the pulpit."

"Marriages are quite beyond our own
management and contrivance," said Mrs.
Turner, musingly: " my mother's was very
romantic. In travelling from her father's house
to her grandmother's, where she was going to
live with the old lady, she had to stay a night in
Hereford—it was in the time of coaches, you
know—and her father wrote to a glover
there, to meet her at the coach-office, and
recommend her to an inn. He invited her
to stay with his sister instead; and she was
so smitten with his manners and appearance,
that she said to herself, ' If ever I marry, I
hope it may be to Mr. Harper.' She went on
the next morning to her grandmother's, and
lived with her fourteen years, never seeing or
hearing anything of Mr. Harper of Hereford;
and she actually refused several good offers
during that time. At last her grandmother
died; and Mr. Harper being connected with
her family, he was invited to the funeral;
and an acquaintance followed, which ended
in their marriage."

"I am afraid," chimed in Mrs. Hyde, a
lady who was a comparative stranger to all
of us, '' that if I confess the singular
circumstances of my marriage, you will none of you
think so well of me as I should wish you;
but as we are talking of extraordinary
matches, I am sure you will be amused at
mine. When I was five-and-thirty, I had
not had a single offer; partly, I fancy,
because I had a twin sister so like me, that no
one was sure which he was in love with.
Well, I was one of the few women who give
up the idea of being married after they have
turned thirty, and I settled myself down into
a comfortable old-maidism. One afternoon,
I was out on some errand or other, when a
tradesman, whom I had known all my life,
a confirmed bachelor, over forty years of age,
overtook me in the street. Before we reached
the end of it, he had said, ' Miss Mary, I've
had you in my eye a long time: do you think
you could be happy as my wife ? ' and I had
answered, ' Yes, I really think I should.'
' Well, then,' he added, ' let us be married
without any fuss: and if you want lots of
clothes and things as women do, let them
come out of my pocket, instead of your poor
mother's.' And we were married in three
weeks, though, I assure you, I had not the
remotest notion of such a thing before that
afternoon."

" I will tell you the most marvellous occurrence
that ever came under my observation,"
said our minister's wife, who is a little,
merry, talkative woman. "My husband and
I were, next to the parties themselves, chief
actors in it; so I know all the circumstances
well. It was in the town where my husband
first entered upon the ministry, and where
we had what is called a very united people,
which often means," she said, shrewdly,
"that everybody knows and deplores everybody
else's failings and inconsistencies. Some
years after our call there, a young lady came
with her mother to establish, if they could,
a millinery business. They belonged to us,
and before they arrived a sister of the elder
lady called upon us, to announce their intention,
and to prepare us for the reception of
new members. She told us quite a melancholy
story of losses and misfortunes; and,
amongst other things, that of the amputation
of Miss Wigley's leg. You know my husband
is not an unfeeling man; but he had had a
very fatiguing sabbath the day before, and
his spirits were in that state of reaction
which made him inclined to laugh at
anything, and he so completely puzzled poor
Mrs. James with allusions to Miss Kilmansegg
and the merchant of Rotterdam, that
the worthy old lady began seriously to
recapitulate their pedigree, to prove there was
no connection between their families, unless
it were on Mr. Wigley's side. For a long