indeed, hath not been trackless: deep is the impress of thy footsteps.

Fifteen years are passed away since Mr. Lyndham's departure; and many and various are the events that have befallen us. But, first, I would speak of Mr. Sidney.

How changed is he! Bankrupt in fortune, prostrate in spirit, few would recognize the once zealous, sanguine, active man of business. Where is the firm step, the upright figure, the keen glance? Gone! for ever gone! and in their place, you may note a shambling gait, a shrunken frame, an eye that wanders restlessly, or is fixed in drear abstraction on the ground. He, who during forty years of his life never missed his diurnal walk to the City, never failed to make his appearance on 'Change at the very moment of ' closing the market,' now rarely stirs from his small gloomy parlour, where, with head just raised above the blinds, he notes each passer-by, and shrinks if in return they cast a casual glance on the care-worn face of the bankrupt merchant.

But there is another, and a sadder change; one, at least, that touches me more nearly. With sorrow I look on Viola Sidney, and mark the ravages that grief, far more than time, has wrought in her once peerless beauty. Her eye has lost its lustre, her form its symmetry, her cheek is pale, far paler than

it was wont to be; she is grown old before her time.

In Mrs. Sidney I see but little alteration; her toilette is rather more elaborate; her figure is somewhat amplified; she frets over her domestic calamities; she frets, too, at the smallness of her apartments, and diminution in her list of visiting acquaintance, although in confidential moments she owns to us that, "Were it not for the look of the thing, she should scarcely regard the loss of her carriage, as she has so much more time to get on with her embroidery;" and she points exultingly to a set of chairs, which, with pains-taking diligence, she completed in something less than five years. She piques herself much on the economy displayed in this arrangement, perversely forgetting that the mounting of the said chairs cost just double the sum which she need have expended on a plain set of mahogany.

The other members of Mr. Sidney's family are

... but why should I anticipate? Wherefore should I "leave untried the growth of that wide gap?" Memory opens her flood-gates: old scenes, old times, old recollections crowd on me: my very thoughts seem peopled. I am but just risen from a sick bed (that haunt of egotism); my meditations, during the last few months, have revolved in one small circle, of which self has been the centre ; I

have been, so to say, self-ridden. The very demon of egotism has possessed me; I must exorcise the fiend; I must think of others, talk of others, write of others. Mine be the task to link the present with the past.

THERE are, I suppose, few persons who may not, on reviewing their past lives, recall some brief episode in their existence, some isolated point in their career, which has vanished like a morning dream or summer cloud. The period alluded to may have been one of deepest anguish; it may, on the contrary, have been an oasis in the desert of existence; still, equally has it passed away, and left no vestige of its being. It has seemed to bear no relation to the past, to have no connexion with the future.

Such, I soon foresaw, would prove the nature of

our acquaintance with Lord Glenalbert. From the moment of his departure, we found ourselves totally estranged from every member of his family; so complete, indeed, was the severance, that some months elapsed ere I ascertained that Lady Mary Allonby had not long survived the separation from a brother whom she idolized. Even at this distance of time my eyes fill with tears, as I think on her early fate; so fair, so gentle, so beloved! Yet for her had youth's sunniest hours been prematurely clouded o'er with sorrow; and she had learned to look with an eye of faith beyond the portals of the tomb. For such, indeed, it were worse than vain to mourn!

Mrs. Sidney, true to her character, did not relinquish without a struggle, all hope of renewing her acquaintance with Lady Glenalbert; but every overture of civility on her part was met by the Countess and her daughters with haughty insolence, or cool disdain. Even the kind-hearted Lady Sarah Herbert testified no inclination to resume an intercourse which had commenced under such happy auspices, and which had promised to be so abiding in its duration. She passed the whole of that, to us, memorable season in London; but not once did the sight of her visiting ticket gladden Mrs. Sidney's eyes.

Mrs. Page, indeed, from her intimacy with the