keep my wife and the baby in a state of
the strictest discipline; could curtsey magnificently,
when the unoffending master, whom
she was eating out of house and home, entered
the room, preserving her colour, her equilibrium,
and her staylaces, when she sank
down and when she swelled up again, without
the vestige of an apparent effort. During
the month of her devastating residence under
my roof, she had two hundred and forty-eight
meals, including the snacks; and she went
out of the house no larger and no redder
than she came in. After the statement of
one such fact as that, further comment is
superfluous.

I leave this case in the hands of the medical
and the married public. I present it, as
a problem, to physiological science. I offer
it, as a warning, to British husbands with
limited incomes. While I write these lines,
while I give my married countrymen this
friendly caution, my wife is weeping over
the tradesmen's bills; my children are on
half-allowance of food; my cook is worked
off her legs; my purse is empty. Young
husbands, and persons about to marry, commit
to memory the description here given of
my late monthly nurse! Avoid a tall and
dignified woman, with a flowing style of conversation
and impressively ladylike manners!
Beware, my struggling friends, my fellow-toilers
along the heavily-taxed highways of
domestic happiness—beware of Mrs. Bullwinkle!

YEARS AND YEARS AGO.

"Toutes ces choses sont passées
Comme l'ombre et comme le vent!"

VICTOR HUGO.

These things have passed upon their mournful way,
Like the wild wind, and like the shadows grey.

SUZANNE was not sixteen, and I was barely
nineteen, when we first met. She was the
daughter, the only child, of a poor Protestant
pastor near La Rochelle, one of the chief and
oldest strongholds of the French Reformed
Church.

At that time I was about as wild a scapegrace
as you would see in any place I could
name at this moment. I had been expelled
from school for heading an insurrection
against the proper authorities; I had got
into endless scrapes in every position in
which my poor father had tried to establish
me; had finished when I was eighteen by
throwing off all restraint, crossing the water,
and, with a knapsack on my back, starting
on a pedestrian tour through some of the
French provinces, not with any definite aim
or object, or in pursuance of any settled plan,
but to exercise my usurped liberty, and to get
rid of some of the superfluous life that would
not let me rest. Of adventures I had plenty;
but the relation of these is little to the point
now. At La Rochelle, chance, as I called it
then, threw Suzanne in my way. Whether
she was beautiful or not, I hardly know. She
was utterly unlike anyone I ever saw before
or since;—a little thing with a pair of eyes
that prevented your seeing anything else when
they were before you;- a pair of eyes which,
like those of the German fairy, were not only
one barleycorn bigger (I think they were two
barleycorns bigger) than anybody else's eyes
in the world; but which loved you, and
repulsed you, and pitied and scorned you,
and laughed with you, and cried for you, and
made you wild with delight, and desperate
with despair, twenty times a-day.

From the first time I saw her, I pursued
her without ceasing; and we often met by
those accidents that occur when two people
do their best to aid fate in her arrangements.
At the back of the presbytère was a garden
full of roses, and lilies, and jasmines, and all
sorts of beautiful old-fashioned flowers that
grow anywhere you may plant them, but
that can no more get common or worthless
for all their bounteous blooming, than if they
required to be watered with champagne.
Beyond the garden is what is called a châtaigneraie;
a little wood, carpeted with close
turf, moss and wild-flowers, overshadowed
with magnificent chestnut-trees, each of which
might form a study for a landscape-painter.
Only a paling and a wicket separated the
garden and the wood; and, the latter being
unenclosed, any one had a right to wander
there at will,—a privilege of which the
peasants in the neighbourhood, having other
means of employing their time, seldom
availed themselves; and it was, except at the
chestnut gathering, generally deserted.

So there I used to repair in the glowing
July days, with a sketch-book, to look business-like;
and, lying on the grass, or leaning
against a tree, myself half-hidden, watch for
Suzanne. How it is all before me now—
before me now, and in me, and about me—
Good heaven, how clearly,—after all these
years!

The broad, rugged trunks of the trees; the
sunlight streaming with a soft, green light
through the leaves; the warm, ripe, still
heat that quivered before my half-closed
eyes; and there, there beyond, through a
narrow vista, an opening, as it were, into
heaven, in the guise of a little bit of the
pastor's garden, blazing in sunshine and
flowers. On this my eyes would fix till the
angel should come to give it a holier light.
Sometimes I waited through the long hours
in vain; sometimes I saw her pass and re-pass,
coming and going like alternate sun
and shadow, as the place seemed brightened
or darkened with her presence and departure.
Then, how my heart beat; how I
watched, how I listened!—did she guess I
was there!—did she wish to come?—was it
timidity or indifference that prevented her
turning her steps this way?—Useless. She
would not come to-day; and, cross and sick
at heart, I left the wood, and wandered homeward
to mine inn,—the bare, hot chambers