Page:New Peterson magazine 1859 Vol. XXXV.pdf/30

 BEAUTIES BY

AND BEAUTY.

HOLYOKI.

MBHITABLE.

So the dream is ended, judge!”

‘What dream?”

“Yours.”

“Ah, forgive me! These perplexing cases draw us, unconsciously, into habits of abstrac- tion.”

“Can you look in my eyes and declare you were dreaming of a case at law!”

‘Let me try. I’! suppose you a widow, with eight small children, and an estate to be ad- ministered. The dear departed never deluded you. I give it up!—I was dreaming of love.”

‘Love? A Judge of Probate—married these fifteen years?”

“Yet not so antiquated—not unfitted yet for life’s delight, my cousin! Lizzie, go ask your mother if my valise will be ready within an hour. She may need your assistance.”

As his daughter left the apartment, Judge Wilson looked at her thoughtfully,

“Lizzie is growing up a fine girl—she will be beautiful, notwithstanding her mother——”

“Oh, Harry!—Susan is such a dear, bright, genial, self-forgetful soul.’

“Go on forever adding epithet to epithet, and you cannot overpraise her; yet my wife is not handsome—never was; that nose-——”

‘‘Makes the heaviest shadow in your lot, I do believe. Will you never outgrow your boyish devotion to beauty?”

“We do not outgrow our tastes, cousin; we only learn to distinguish between genera and species, names and things; and this brings me back to my dream. Did I ever tell you how I chanced to marry Susan Gladstone?”

‘‘No, I supposed in my simplicity you married her because she was willing to accept you.”

‘“‘Touchy as ever on the woman question. Let me relate, then, how one of the high celestial- haif of humankind was led to smile on me.”

‘‘That is more modest.”

“In my youth I was in love with every pretty face, high and low, white and brown—every phase of prettiness attracted me—you smile— you remember it. There were few young men in our town of Milford.”

‘‘Few so attractive as Harry Wilson: that is, so handsome, obliging, agreeable, so idle, care- less, altogether suited for a ladies’ man.”

Good,—qualify! There were but one or two of my eet, and it is no boast to say I excelled them; so I was like a bee in a pot of honey, emothered with sweets, and, at last sated. I was but a briefiess barrister all this while, poor as well as fickle, and the thought of marriage, had it once entered my head, would have been dismissed as insane. So, at least, I said to my- self now and then; you know thoughts enter eur head sometimes, and our hearts, whose presence we do not acknowledge: they should be dismissed, must be, when fairly detected; but oh, they are precious |

‘*One day, your brother George—it was about the time of his ordination and marriage—under- took to exercise his skill in sermonizing on my luckless self. His firstly, wae my idle, aimless life, you may be sure; his secondly, my oppor- tunities, capacities, all thet—his words have proved prophetic, more than I anticipated; his thirdly, was the influence of women; fourth, the peace and bliss of married life; fifth, the joy of home, and so on, to ninth and nineteenthly. I laughed, contradicted, argued, and believed. I had felt it all before, but not so deeply. I now went home to meditate.

‘¢How different things are as our moods change! New and marvellous meanings attach themselves to familiar objects—we discern a meaning where once there was only a form. I was in Boston with the bridal party, and in leav- ing George's Hotel that evening, looked up at the houses all alike, all blocked together, and for the first time thought of them as homes. Did you ever allow that fancy to run wild in some strange city, or street? Bright romances and mournful tragedies I wove, and the tragedies all proceeded from aimless, unmated existence.

‘‘fo marry either of the Milford girls was not possible, I liked them all too well, should be thinking sometimes that the wrong one accepted me. I would make a choice from among my city friends; there was little Eudora Stanmore, a pet of mine in her echool days—ns lovely and un- worldly as a vision. Stanmore, Stanmore. I darted into an apothecary’s, seized a directory : ‘Leonard Stanmore, house in Mt. Vernon street,’ that was strange. Evudora’s father had not been wealthy; ‘he was now,’ the clerk said, ‘hed made