Sedley's face, "and secret grief is peculiarly affecting to me."

Sedley stared with astonishment, and the fair Matilda saw her bridal dress in perspective, she felt inspired, and thus resumed,—

"Oh! Sir Herbert, how powerful are the charms of music-listen to those dulcet strains which float through the room."

These dulcet strains proceeded from the instruments of three musicians belonging to the town of

The leader of the band

was a Welch harper, who played on in happy regardlessness of tune and time. The second musician was a fiddler, and the third a flageolet player. Each instrument was tuned in a different key, and the harper took the lead as to time; the fiddle was half a bar behind the harp, and the flageolet, not wishing to appear intrusive, was a note or two behind the fiddle. However, they generally managed to come in all together at the finishing chord, and so the discord passed off admirably.

After some time Miss Williams said,-" As

a very elegant young man of large fortune, (the man and his fortune were both in the moon) but when you approached me, I totally forgot his existence, and now I see him coming to reproach me,-I tremble for the consequences, -I would not for worlds embroil you in a freecaw (fracas) on my account!"

Sir Herbert Sedley could scarce repress a smile at the extreme absurdity of Miss Matilda Williams, but as no infuriated youth approached to call him to account for his monopoly, her fears were soon appeased, and the dance ended. Sedley then hoped that his task was over, but to his cost, he found that his fair partner was of a different way of thinking. She remained tacked to his arm, and even refused taking any refreshment, being unwilling to release her victim; she was so much accustomed to see her partners take advantage of the first moment of recovered liberty to make their escape, that, although she found Sedley less refractory in his bonds than most of his predecessors, she dared not make the experiment.

As poor Sedley was paraded about the rooms, he felt strongly inclined to ask the fair Matilda if she had ever read "Mazeppa," but his halfformed resolution was frustrated by Mrs. Williams, who came up to ask her daughter some question. The kind mother at length concluded by saying,

"Do you feel tired love?"

"Not in the slightest degree," replied her daughter, "when the mind is deeply engaged in intellectual communion, the frame feels not the ills of life."

Just at these words a gallant son of Mars, who had come over to the ball from an adjacent garrison, to exhibit his uniform and his ferocious moustaches to the admiring belles of

happened to come swaggering along, trying to look unconscious of the enormous sensation he created. Most unhappily, in passing the fair Matilda Williams, one of his spurs got entangled in the light drapery of her muslin dress, and an alarming rent was the consequence.

Matilda's sentimentality quite vanished at this

Sedley's face, "and secret grief is peculiarly affecting to me.”

Sedley stared with astonishment, and the fair Matilda saw her bridal dress in perspective, she felt inspired, and thus resumed,—

"Oh! Sir Herbert, how powerful are the charms of music-listen to those dulcet strains which float through the room."

These dulcet strains proceeded from the instruments of three musicians belonging to the town of

The leader of the band

was a Welch harper, who played on in happy regardlessness of tune and time. The second musician was a fiddler, and the third a flageolet player. Each instrument was tuned in a different key, and the harper took the lead as to time; the fiddle was half a bar behind the harp, and the flageolet, not wishing to appear intrusive, was a note or two behind the fiddle. However, they generally managed to come in all together at the finishing chord, and so the discord passed off admirably.

After some time Miss Williams said,-" As