knows another, and your wife, who alone knows all, is at their head, and busily engaged in conversation with the single individual who sits beside her. In another cluster towards the door, stand the gentlemen, and you amongst them; one-half with their hands crossed in front, like soldiers under the command "stand at ease,” and looking straight towards the fire; the other half grouped around the only gentleman who, apparently, has any thing to say. In fact, the two sexes seem here to be actually at that war which fabling poets have represented husbands and wives to have been from the beginning of time. Were there a vacant seat on the sofa, there is not a gentleman who would not throw himself upon the serried spears of a hostile army rather than take it. It may be remarked, that gentlemen have generally, from their intercourse with the world, an easy polite way of making friends with each other, on any occasion where they may be by chance thrown together. But there is a great difference between a stranger gentleman and a stranger lady. Somehow or other, one's wife is always a cast above one's self in gentility. She is more dignified naturally, or more under artificial restraint, or something or other: hence, I know many men as very plain familiar persons, while I could not speak to their wives without a great deal of polite and deferential reserve, This difficulty as to the ladies is a matter which tends to add greatly to the horrors of the evening, now fairly commenced.

When a party of this kind is finally seated at table, nothing but a real meeting of creditors could possibly be more sombre than it is, and no situation but that of the debtor could be more embarrassing than yours. Mr Brown is placed between Mrs White and Mrs Reid, and Mrs Brown is stuck in between the husbands of those ladies; but there is no prismatic phenomenon to make these colours harmonise or blend, as in their namesakes of the rainbow. The whole is an inert mass of dull well-dressed people, without a single spark of Promethean fire to put it into action,

and which even the best of meat and drink is exerted upon in vain. The dinner is eaten without any other conversation than what is necessary for the interchange and distribution of the good things upon the table; and even the half cheerful request of a dram from some heartier guest than the rest, placed near the landlord, fails of its usual effect in lighting up a general smile, if it does not absolutely throw some into a gloomy quandary as to the propriety of mentioning such a thing as spirits at such a table. After a little while, the sacred nine, with your wife as a kind of Calliope at their head, retire, and then the table looks like a tree which has suddenly shed all its blossoms -unless that the fruit remains behind. You then move to the head of the table, and make an effort at inspiring cordiality, by requesting your friends to draw up near you. But all won't do. These good decent men will drink, and drink, and drink, and yet be dull. Two or three of them talk in groups about some stupid municipal matter, or what some clergyman said about something one day (such people have a way of reporting clergymen's sayings with a great deal of reverential appreciation), or about any other matter of narrow local interest. But every thing like the true social effect of the grape is absent, and-so, after sitting very inanely for two hours or so (drinking a great deal of wine, however), a particularly grave and reverend signior makes a motion that you should go up to the drawing-room, in order to get a cup of tea; a proposition you assent to, but without any hope of its either cheering or inebriating the men you have been entertaining. Here the beforedinner scene is renewed in all but its former stiffness and coldness, and then, and then, they all troop off, leaving you in an utter vacation of spirits, your house revolutionised, and your wife in raptures with the compliment paid to her by Mrs Reid, as to what a pleasant party she had got together.

LOSSES IN FAMILIES.

MANY families grow up and live long together, without the bond of their affections being once either strained or broken. They know that death is the common lot of humanity; they see it daily carrying off neighbours and acquaintances. Some of their own relations have felt its power; and they have thus become familiar with all the symptoms and fashions of external woe: but the destroyer has never intruded on their own sacred domain. Year after year, diseases have prevailed around them, and made successive inroads upon every fireside; but theirs has still escaped. They thus become in some measure singular, and isolated from the rest of the world-their hearts certainly not closed against its sympathies, but not deeply exercised in them. If a mother remain long inconsolable for the loss of a child, they think she is not altogether blameless. "All must die," some member of the establishment will remark; some are early cut long but the stroke will come. against what we cannot help? lutely necessary, and it is proper. not ended when those who are dearest to us are taken away; we must still attend to our own interests, and make provision for those who are dependent upon us. The business of life must not be interrupted." "It's all true you say," was the reply we once heard given to a female acquaintance by a woman of the humbler rank in Scotland, who had endured serious family bereavements: "but, oh, woman, it's plain you never lost a bairn !"

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off; some are spared Why, then, contend Resignation is both absoBesides, our duties are

Such a family as that we have been describing have never had their attachments towards each other greatly tried. There has been no occasion for a display of indignant unforgivingness on the part of one, or of unwearied persevering love from another. Their feelings are all of an equable cast. This quiet, however, is broken in upon

at last. A son, perhaps, in the pride of his days, is seized with a grievous disease. His mother watches him with anxiety; but she entertains almost a certain expectation that he will speedily be restored to his former health. None of the symptoms are decidedly against hope; the sufferer's constitution has not been weakened by intemperance, by irregularity of any kind, or by previous ailments; so the chance of recovery is in his favour. He still sinks; but all maladies have their crisis; and she thinks, every night, that surely he will be better to-morrow. With what tender solicitude does she minister to the wants of his sickbed! How she watches his looks, and catches up the faintest expression of a desire on his pallid countenance ! Her hopes of his recovery daily become weaker and weaker. Her first expectations of his recovery vanish. Every look of the attending physician is watched with an anguish almost indescribable, and she now seriously apprehends the very worst. The features of her son at length assume the rigid and sunken aspect of those of a corpse, and she cannot mistake the dim glare of the eye before it shuts in everlasting rest. Thus the delusion comes to an end; and when the child of her affection, perhaps the expected prop of her declining years, at last breathes his last on her bosom, she feels as if some cord that bound her heart had for ever given way. Who can pretend to describe her sufferings, as, stretched afterwards on a couch which almost seems her own deathbed, she gives way to a grief which any attempt to interrupt or soften is felt by all her friends as if it would only be an impertinence? The whole frame seems convulsed; moans of deepest anguish seem to issue, not from the organs of speech, but from the heart itself; and ever and anon, as the terrible image of her dying son, with all the horrors of the neighbouring death-chamber, comes into her mind (for it will not be banished), she utters frantic cries, which pierce the ears of all within the limits of that sorrow-stricken house. When language is found, it is employed in exclamations which testify the love

and admiration she felt towards her son-a love far transcending, she now thinks, all she ever experienced regarding the rest of her children. The rest, indeed-the

fortunate living-seem as nothing in her eyes;

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appears to her as if she had never loved any but him who now lies so powerless, so forlorn, and whom she is never to see again. 'My beautiful—my brave !" as the tragic poet has finely expressed a mother's feelings on such an occasion: him whom every body loved and admired-who was always so cheerful and so affectionate-can it really be-for, after all she has seen, this question will occur that you are no more?

It is fortunate for human nature that grief, however overwhelming at first, daily becomes less severe. Were the earliest impressions of our sorrow for ever to remain unobliterated, the world would speedily be filled with lamentation and woe. Thus, Time rolls on, and the sufferings of the disconsolate mother become less poignant. The severity of the trial she has endured has softened her nature, and made her resigned to the dispensations of an inscrutable Providence. The recollection of her lost son is recalled to her by almost every passing circumstance; if there is an occasion of rejoicing in the family, she thinks, "this would have been a time of delight to him if he had been spared." She sees the place he would have occupied among his brothers and sisters; she considers the very words he would have used, had he been alive to join in their conversation. If she hears a tune played, she remembers it was his favourite; if she sees a fine landscape, the thought passes in her mind how he delighted in woodland scenery. Another of her family falls, and another, and another; but she does not deceive herself now. "The first time," she acknowledges, "she never thought her poor son would die till she saw him lifeless before her ; all the rest, from the moment they were taken ill, she was prepared to see cut off. The earliest was snatched from her; those that died afterwards were resigned.