making up a bald, sallow, savage, dark-looking skeleton, into a bland, graceful, blooming, elegant cavalier. All that Nature had done towards this result was the bestowing on him a very tall, majestic, large boned frame, a pair of lustrous black eyes, and a shewy nose. Art supplied a ventilating peruque on which both hair and head were so perfect, the imposition was not only never detected, but never even suspected. Art dyed, with corresponding glossy black, the grisly eye-brows, moustaches and whiskers, tinted the cheeks and lips, supplied two dazzling rows of pearly teeth, rounded to perfection the hollowed lanky form and sent forth be-furred, be-braided, covered with orders, and fragrant of heliotrope, The Marchese di Castelnuovo-the admired of all admirers, the envied of the men, the courted of the women, and who, two hours before he left the temple of Art, (his Dressing-room,) was a squalid, shrunken wreck-bald, toothless, old and ugly! Still he was the Marquis de Castelnuovoattaché to one embassy, and expecting to be himself an ambassador, received at Court and fêted everywhere, and such as he was, in reality, some thirty years her senior, Louisa Beauchamp, at eighteen, fell desperately in love with him, bestowed herself, and her ten thousand pounds upon him, and was considered by all her English friends to have made a brilliant. match, almost equal in splendour to that of her sister Augusta, whose husband, though an English Peer, had none of the personal advantages of the marquis, whose bald head glistened like a new born mushroon; whose nose and chin approximated sadly; who cared more for comfort than for show; whose corpulence no belt restrained; who never tried to please, but only to be pleased-made love to every pretty woman, because it amused him to do so, and married, from a mere freak, and because a nephew, whom he envied and disliked, admired the blooming Augusta and asked her to 'polk' with him; and the artful young Husband-Hunter having coldly declined, whispered into the ear of the old beau, "does Captain Trevanian not know how much I prefer sitting by you, to dancing with him. His conversation after yours is like luke warm Bucellas after iced Champagne." The earl of Tunbridge looked into the softly animated face of Miss Beauchamp. She gazed tenderly at him-" I'll marry, I'll have an heir yet and cut out that puppy," he thought. He proposed, was joyfully accepted and at the end of a month, Augusta became Countess of Tunbridge. Throw the bridal veil over both those weddings. It is not yet time to lift it, and to ask, what lies beyond those piles of silver favors, orange wreaths, gay trousseaus, glittering gems and white kid gloves. At present all we know is, that envy whitened the very lips that tried to smile congratulation-that every letter of every female friend or foe of the Beauchamps was full of nothing but these splendid matches, that Lady Beauchamp was in a fever of ecstasy, though left alone in her glory, for the Marquis took his bride at once to his Palazzo at Florence, and the Earl of Tunbridge carried his countess and his chronic rheumatism to Baden-Baden. And of all whose heads these nuptials filled with schemes, of all whose hearts in consequence beat high with emulation, none perhaps surpassed the aunt of the brides, whose daughters, Rosalie and Jeannetta, had officiated among the bridesmaids, and whose appearance had elicited so much admiration, that their mother resolved to accelerate, by one year, the projected and long wished for season of their introduction. CHAPTER II. THE MOTHER AND DAUGHTERS, AND THE OLD SCOTCH AUNT. MRS. ORDE had a very handsome jointure, and her daughters six-thousand pounds a-piece in actual possession, as much more on their attaining their majority and a reversionary interest in a thousand a-year, dependant on their mother's death, but which, as she was of a good constitution and in the prime of life, it seemed probable would not very soon be theirs! Of |