his education, and had been placed under old
Pearson's care. Colonel Bradby died shortly
after his son arrived in England. The secret
was, that Colonel Bradby had been allowed by
her parents to marry a lady in whose family
he afterwards discovered there was insanity;
that Ernest bore the hereditary taint; that
Colonel Bradby had left it as his solemn
charge that his son should never marry.

This was the terrible bar to our union!
Sad as it was, there was consolation in finding
that Ernest was yet true to me; I would be
true to him, poor fellow. I declared this
solemnly to Dr. Roberts—faithful to the end
of life! I might still have his love and
sympathy, though from afar off. But why
had not Pearson told me this secret himself?
It was very strange!

And then Dr. Roberts desired to see papa.

I hesitated what to say. At last I asked,
if he had not heard the sad news?

"What news?"

"Westby's bank stopped this morning at
eleven!"

"Why, my dear," he replied in amazement,
"I got a cheque cashed there at twelve o'clock,
and had a five minutes chat with Westby
himself."

*****

Ernest has just come into our room; I
tried to hide my eyes, but he soon found that
I had been crying, and would know the
cause. He says he is very angry that I
should have upset myself with writing about
that saddest day of our courtship. He won't
let me write anything more on the subject;
but I have already nearly given you the
whole account. How extraordinary to think
that all the pain we suffered that day should
have been the work of that poor insane Pearson,
who, with the most terrible cunning,
invented such plausible stories, in the terror
of which to hide his own malady! Even Dr.
Roberts was at first quite deceived by his
manner. It seems, poor man, for some days
previously his clerks had observed much
strangeness in his demeanour. The story he
told of Ernest was word for word true of
his own family and condition.

I sometimes tell Ernest that we owe our
present happiness to the painful distress oi
that day. I scarcely think we should have
been married yet; for Ernest's law-suit really
ended, as you are aware, in a judgment
against him, had not Dr. Roberts told papa
that he would not answer for my life if I
had to undergo any more of such wearing
trouble and anxiety. So papa made us an
allowance, and with what Ernest gets by
painting, it is quite as much as we require.

We are so happy. Ernest generally paints
in the open air, and I sit near him working,
or sketching under his tuition. He has just
finished such a lovely landscape; a view from
a hill near Interlachen, of the pasture land
between the two lakes Thun and Brienz
with the castle of Unspunnen, Manfred's
castle, and the gorge of the Lauterbrunnen
valley in the background. We walked to
this point of view the day after we arrived
at Interlachen—a stormy day, with gleams
of bright sunshine. We traversed an
ascending path through thick pines which shut
out the view till we had attained the summit
of the hill; and then broke upon us the
wonderful landscape, bright sunshine in the fore-
ground rendering every object and colour in
the green pasture level intensely visible; but
higher up, concealing the Jungfrau, closing
over the Lauterbrunnen gorge, hung a mass
of dense black cloud, and from widest point
to point of the view, framing the whole scene,
sprung a rainbow of vivid hues. This scene
could not have been witnessed in all its
beauty from any other spot than the one we
occupied; and we were alone. The feeling
of this impressed us very deeply. Before we
left, the lovely rainbow had died away, and
the bright sunshine, and the whole landscape
was dark with rain. I thought of Ernest's
words, " Nothing on earth can divide us now."
Amid our great happiness the scene we had
witnessed seemed like a solemn but gentle
admonition from Heaven of the transitoriness
of earthly things. * * In a few
days we start for Italy and Rome.

To Mrs. Anderson, 18, London Street, Sydney.

SHADOWLESS MEN.

ADELBERT VON CHAMISSO explained the
meaning of the history of Peter Schlemihl,
the shadowless man, in the preface to a
French translation of his tale. The solid
body alone casts a shadow. "The science of
finance instructs us sufficiently respecting
the value of money; the value of a shadow is
less generally acknowledged. My thoughtless
friend was covetous of money, of which he
knew the value, and forgot to think upon
solid substance." Chamisso wrote Peter
Schlemihl in a Prussian solitude, in which he
devoted himself to botany and zoology, and
in the year eighteen hundred and thirteen,
when the insolidity of the type Frenchman—
Bonaparte—was the great fact of the time.
Whether conqueror or covetous man, he who
forgets the essential for the accessory sells
his shadow to the Grey Man. "It was,"
says Chamisso, " the wish of rny friend that
the lesson which he had paid for so dearly
should be turned to our profit, and his bitter
experience calls to us with a loud voice,
' Think on the solid—the substantial!'"

Modern society is alarmed every few years
by shadowless men. Families were ruined
in eighteen hundred and forty-seven by their
speculations, and in eighteen hundred and
fifty-seven by their accommodation-bills.
They are a constant source of danger for the
heads of homes. Ladies closely tied to them
are continually having their lives blighted
by them. They make many young ladies