have reclined on this sofa; for fifteen years this spirit of mine has whispered, "Vanity of vanities!" I am sixty, my dear, and you are eighteen. You never saw your good papa, and I had passed a whole long lifetime of happiness with him before you were born. It seems a hundred years ago that I had other children-girls young and handsome as you; boys gallant and wild like that lieutenant who is to be your brother. There is a tombstone in Brighton churchyard, with our name on it; and She who sleeps beneath, had she lived, would have been two-and-forty now, and your mamma a greatgrandmother. They are all dead, child-Charley, and Harry, and Will. I can scarcely realise the fact that they ever lived, but for their little letters and playthings, and a tiny odd glove-it was bought in Lamb's Conduit Street, in the year 1822,-with the thumb stiffened with the gnawing of the little teeth that have crumbled away, oh! ever so many years since. It is dreadful to think upon what the grave hides to think that beneath that slab, and the turf, and planks, all that we so loved and cherished-all that used to smile, laugh, and dance, lies mouldering there in a box. Better to be as my Harry, deep, deep among the coral reefs of the Indian Sea. And yet it is a mercy, too, my daughter, to know that decay has done its worst, and that dust has returned to dust. The better part, the Spirit of the loved, burns brighter, and lives again, spurning its dull earthly envelope, in old fond hearts, and beckons us to Come. But a little, little while, and our bones, too, shall be laid beneath the slab-and quickly may they moulder, that we may sooner meet those that have gone before. I think of this often, and without despondency, as men and women as old and wellnigh as feeble as myself, come and chatter around my sofa. When we are young, Louisa, we thirst for the possession of a palace, from which a tyrant is keeping us out.

When we are old, we are in a prison, from which we pray the Tyrant to deliver us; and yet we have grown so accustomed to it, that when the jailer is weary, and the dungeondoor stands wide open, we shudder to snatch at the deliverance and to venture forth into the open air.

You have not been much with me, dear girl, and have, therefore, the more need of my advice. The bedside of a sick and cross old woman was not the place for blooming youth and health. I wished you to hear other conversation than the bald, worldly gossip that we, poor crippled pensioners of the Battle of Life, were fain to indulge in. Let me see you had a nursery governess, Miss Fluff, whom you scratched and bit, when I, too weak to undertake the task

myself, instructed her to whip you. You completely tyrannised over poor Fluff, whose father was a respectable person in the coal trade, and had been ruined by winning a ten thousand pound prize in the lottery. You were then, if my remembrance serve me, sent to Miss Gimp's establishment, Sussex Square, Kemp Town, Brighton. It was there you learned to sing false, to mispronounce the French and Italian languages, and to have your sketch-book filled with elaborate pencillings and water-colourings by Mr. Urban Raffles, your drawing-master. Amelia-Charlotte wanted me to send you then-you were fifteen-to Madame de Vergenne's Pensionnat de Demoiselles, Cité Beaujon, Champs Elysées, Paris. Your dear papa had a vast prejudice against French schools, which he associated somehow with Jacobinism, Tom Paine, and General Buonaparte; and although I should have wished you to acquire the real Parisian accent(I received my own finishing from the Marquis Ailler de St. Pigeon, an emigrant of '89, who adored the unhappy Marie Antoinette, and lived at Old Brompton)-I yielded to the almost dying injunctions of Sir Charles Chesterfield.

life on their own account; they want experience—and, besides, you have no cousins here. You say that there were three clergymen in the carriage-two elderly, stout, and florid; the third young, thin, and pale; and that you conversed with them all on the weather and similar topics till they alighted at Portsoking-cum-Bordoe. In this, my dear, you were in error. Had the thin, pale young man been alone, no harm would have been done. The clergy of the Established Church are generally safe and proper persons to know, although with Dissenters I should require references ere I spoke to them; but, to judge by his company, this young man was a curate, and his fellow-travellers were probably beneficed, perhaps dignified clergymen. Did they wear aprons, my dear, or black gaiters? Had they shovel hats? The higher clergy are averse to the patronage in their presence of younger men. The position in the most respectable society of a young lady who knows an archdeacon, or a prebendary, is made. You can scarcely, I fear, ever hope for the friendship of a Bishop. Casual as are the rencontres of railway travelling, they occasionally ripen into acquaintance; and you are too young and too unprotected enough to know any clergyman beneath the rank of a rural dean. In the country one can ask young parsons to tea. They will run messages for you, often sing second prettily, and are useful in shopping to carry things for you; but, in London, to be friendly with a curate is one of the last refuges of an old maid, a chaperon, a surgeon's wife, and a finishing governess.

Siphkins, my companion (who has dropped off to sleep while reading "Adam Bede" to me, and so given me time to scrawlyou and I only know with what pain-this letter), has been in love with a curate for nine years. The poor creatureSiphkins's tendre-has seventy pounds a year; and his rector, who receives about seven hundred, resides (for his lungs) at