Ayala’s Angel III

hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually. It may be that he will yet learn that a broad back with a heavy weight upon it gives the best chance of happiness here below. Of Lord John’s married prospects I could not say much as he came so very lately on the scene; but even he may perhaps do something in the world when he finds that his nursery is filling, For our special friend Tom Tringle, no wife has been found. In making his effort, — which he did manfully, — he certainly had not chosen the consort who would be fit for him. He had not seen clearly, as had done his sisters and cousins. He had fallen in love too young, — it being the nature of young men to be much younger than young ladies, and, not know­ing himself, had been as might be a barn-door cock who had set his heart upon some azure-plumaged, high-soaring lady of the woods. The lady with the azure plumes had, too, her high­soaring tendencies, but she was enabled by true insight to find the male who would be fit for her. The barn-door cock, when we left him on board the steamer going to New York, had not yet learned the nature of his own requirements. The knowl­edge will come to him. There may be doubts as to Frank Hous­ton, but we think that there need be none as to Tom Trin­gle. The proper wife will be forthcoming; and in future years, when he will probably have a Glenbogie and a Merle Park of his own, he will own that Fortune did well for him in making his cousin Ayala so stern to his prayers.

remains a page or two in which the reader must bid adieu to her as she stands at the altar with her Angel of Light. She was at St­alham for a fortnight before her marriage, in order, as Lady Al­bury said, that the buxom ladysmaid might see that everything had been done rightly in reference to the trousseau. “My dear,” said Lady Albury, “it is important, you know. I dare say you can bake and brew, because you say so; but you don’t know any­thing about clothes.” Ayala, who by this time was very intimate with her friend, pouted her lips, and said that if “Jonathan did not like her things as she chose to have them he might do the other thing.” But Lady Albury had her way, inducing Sir Harry to add something even to Uncle Tom’s liberality, and the buxom woman went about her task in such a fashion that if Colonel Stubbs were not satisfied he must have been a very unconscionable Colonel. He probably would know nothing about it, — except that his bride in her bridal array had not looked so well as in any other garments, which, I take it, is invariably the case, — till at the end of the first year a glim­mer of the truth as to a lady’s wardrobe would come upon him. “I told you there would be a many new dresses before two years were over, Miss,” said the buxom female, as she spread all the frocks and all the worked petticoats and all the collars and all the silk stockings and all the lace handkerchiefs about the bedroom to be inspected by Lady Albury, Mrs. Gosling, and one or two other friends, before they were finally packed up.