have persuaded them that they are not made of common clay, and that the girls who get them will be blessed. From such a blessing young women should pray to be delivered.

Perhaps it may be said that though it is easy to write about choosing a husband, for the majority of English girls, at least, there is but little choice in the matter. Dickens certainly told an American story-very American -of a young lady on a voyage, who, being intensely loved by five young men, was advised to jump overboard and marry the man who jumped in after her." Accordingly, next morning the five lovers being on deck, and looking very devotedly at the young lady, she plunged into the sea. Four of the lovers immediately jumped in after her. When the young lady and four lovers were out again, she said to the captain, "What am I to do with them now, they are so wet?" "Take the dry one." And the young lady did, and married him. How different is the state of affairs on this side of the Atlantic, where, if a young woman is to be married, she must take not whom she will, but whom she can. "Oh me, the word choose! I may neither choose whom I would, nor refuse whom I dislike." But is it necessary to marry? Far better to have no husband than a bad one.

There is a great deal of human nature in the account which Artemus Ward gives of the many affecting ties which made him hanker after Betsy Jane. Her father's farm jined our'n; their cows and our'n squencht their thurst at the same spring; our old mares both had stars in their forrerds; the measels broke out in both famerlies

at nearly the same period; our parients (Betsy's and mine) slept reglarly every Sunday in the same meetinhouse, and the nabers used to obsarve, 'How thick the Wards and Peasleys air!' It was a surblime site, in the spring of the year, to see our sevral mothers (Betsy's and mine) with their gowns pin'd up so thay couldn't sile 'em, affecshunitly bilin sope together and aboozin the nabers."

In this matter more than in most others " we do not will according to our reason, we reason according to our will." True desire, the monition of nature, is much to be attended to. But always we are to discriminate carefully between true desire and false. The medical men tell us we should eat what we truly have an appetite for; but what we only falsely have an appetite for we should resolutely avoid. Ought not choice in matrimony to be guided by the same principle?

Above all things young ladies should ask God, the best maker of marriages, to direct their choice aright.

"How poor are they who have not patience!

What wound did ever heal, but by degrees?"-Shakespeare.

"E'en now, in passing through the garden walks,

Upon the ground I saw a fallen nest,

Ruined and full of ruin; and over it,

Behold, the uncomplaining birds, already

Busy in building a new habitation."-Longfellow.

UT "the best laid schemes of mice and men

gang aft a-gley." We are none of us infallible, "not even the youngest." When the greatest

care has been taken in choosing, people get bad matrimonial bargains. From the nature of the case this must often happen. If not one man in a thousand is a judge of the points of a horse, not one in a million understands human nature. And even if a young man or woman did understand human nature, there are before marriage, as a rule, opportunities of gaining only the slightest knowledge of the character of one who is to be the weal or woe of a new home. It is related in ancient history,

or fable, that when Rhodope, a fashionable Egyptian beauty, was engaged bathing, an eagle stole away one of her shoes, and let it fall near Psammetichus the king. Struck with the pretty shoe, he fell in love with the foot, and finally married the owner of both. Very little more acquaintance with each other have the majority of the Innocents who go abroad into the unknown country of Matrimony to seek their fortunes or misfortunes.

And then the temper and manner of people when making love are so different from what these become afterwards! "One would think the whole endeavour of both parties during the time of courtship is to hinder themselves from being known-to disguise their natural temper and real desires in hypocritical imitation, studied compliance, and continued affectation. From the time that their love is avowed, neither sees the other but in a mask; and the cheat is often managed on both sides with so much art, and discovered afterwards with so much abruptness, that each has reason to suspect that some transformation has happened on the wedding-night, and that by a strange imposture, as in the case of Jacob, one has been courted and another married."

Our conventional state of society curtails the limits of choice in matrimony and hinders the natural law of the marriage of the fittest. We knew a young gentleman living in a London suburb who bore an excellent character, had sufficient income, and was in every respect marriageable. He wished to try the experiment of two against the world, but as he told the clergyman of his parish-he was in the city all day, and never had an opportunity of becoming

acquainted with a young lady whom he could ask to be his wife.

We have heard of the stiff Englishman who would not attempt to save a fellow-creature from drowning because he had never been introduced to him. In the same way unmarried ladies are allowed to remain in the Slough of Despond because the valiant young gentlemen who would rescue them, though they may be almost, are not altogether in their social set.

Every one knows Plato's theory about marriage. He taught that men and women were hemispheres, so to speak, of an original sphere; that ill-assorted marriages were the result of the wrong hemispheres getting together; that, if the true halves met, the man became complete, and the consequence was the "happy-ever-after" of childhood's stories. There is much truth in this doctrine, that for every man there is one woman somewhere in the world, and for every woman one man. They seldom meet in time. If they did, what would become of the sensational novelists ?

But are there not in reality too many artificial obstacles to happy marriages? Why do the right men and women so seldom meet? Because mammon, ambition, envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness step between and keep apart those whom God would join together.

It is true that newly-married people when going through the process of being disillusioned are liable to conclude much too quickly that they have got bad matrimonial bargains. In a letter which Mrs. Thrale, the friend of Dr. Johnson, wrote to a young gentleman on his marriage, she