lators, and faces ploughed with care: truly, they look up to me as beggars, and sometimes I do feel as if I could have compassion on them. I protest it is not love. No, no, gentlemen; my heart is seared. It won't do; I am for none of you. There are all the various modes of suicide left open to you, if you are really still in love with me.

I have the best cook that the county town can supply; the neatest creature of a housekeeper that ever dusted furniture; I am in confederacy with the best tea merchant, and receive a daily visit from one who knows all the gossip and scandal of the neighbourhood. What could be a more delightful way of using up the material of life? It is my maxim always to be a little in advance of the fashions. Thanks to modern artistes, Time can glean about my person but few trophies. A lock that costs him forty years to blanch, I can, with my Titmouse dye, restore to its pristine colour in two hours. If he take a tint from my cheeks, it only prolongs my toilette a little to wrest it from his clutches. Let him remove a tooth if he pleases; Dr. Dent, in a single afternoon, will put a better in its place. So, in spite of Time, and the taunts of disappointed suitors, I shall still be young till I die. I am mistress in my own house, and have a lap-dog to receive my caresses, that never leaves me desolate, always listens patiently to my conversation, and never orders me out of the room, nor comes home drunk. Who does not envy my happiness? I consider it an honour and a privilege to be, what I am, AN OLD MAID.

THE ORPHAN'S SMILE.

ONE smile passed over her sunken cheek,
It told far more than the lip may speak ;
'Twas grief's own poetry, touching chords
That had never woke to the sound of words,
And glimmered there with a light as lone,
As the moon's pale ray on a marble stone.
Love from the green earth for her had gone,
And left her lone as a star at morn,
Whose sister lights had waned and set,
As dawning smiles night's shadows met;
There was nothing left to shine for her,
And make the wide waste lovelier.

Have you ever dreamed of an icy isle,
On which summer sunbeams never smile ?
Lonely and far in the northern seas,
And rudely swept by the chilling breeze?
"Twas thus life's waters moved her on,
A chilled, a sad and a stricken one!

She was beautiful, for beauty's flowers
Bloom not alone in the sunniest bowers;
They love to gather round those who grieve,
And a delicate lustre there to weave;
They dazzle the eye in the festal hall,
But there, the loveliest tints ne'er fall.

But that soft, sad smile, it told you so,

How the light of your love on earth must go;
How the human heart must fill its springs,
With tears for the loss of its dearest things;

You could not gaze and turn away

To the light of pleasure's careless ray.

The sunny months went swiftly by,

The time for flowers to spring and die;

Earth's silver sounds were heard in glee,
And the swell of joyous minstrelsy;

And her fairest things to light awoke,

Save the orphan girl, whose heart was broke!

THE FORTUNES OF MORRIS MONTGOMERY.

MORRIS was the only child of a gentleman in the south district of Scotland, whose estate, from various causes, had almost entirely dwindled into nothing just about the time when the hero of this story entered into life. The father was an aged man, who, having lost his life after the birth of Morris, had centered all his affections, and almost all his hopes, upon the child alone. He received the best education that the country could afford, and throughout his school and college years, he had associated with that class of minor gentry to which his father and a long line of respected ancestors belonged. Even in the midst of rapidly increasing embarrassments, his father formed the warmest hopes of him," for," as he would say to his friends, "if I should not be able to leave my son a penny, he evidently has talents to advance himself in any profession he may adopt." At eighteen he was placed in the office of a country law practitioner, to ground himself in the practice of that line of life, previous, as was contemplated, to his passing as an advocate at the Scottish bar. This latter step, however, he was prevented from taking, by his father having got, from a political ally, the promise of a confidential situation in a government office in Edinburgh. In due time this was obtained, and the young man was accordingly transferred to the capital, to undertake its duties.