MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE. 175 



array that graced the pit, and the boxed partitions above, as far my 

 eye could discern, I could not make out one individual woman with 

 auburn hair, although of carotty ladies (I mean no offence) there 

 was a sufficient number to make, if tied together, an entire bunch ! 

 Warmly as I admire, nay adore, auburn locks, I deprecate those of 

 a carotty suffusion with the utmost powers of antipathy. Red hair 

 is, with reference to auburn, the reductio ad absurdum, the spoil- 

 ing of a good thing by excess : the one is the genial glow of a nature 

 within bounds ; while the other seems the ardent extravagance of 

 we know not what : or, perhaps, it may be said that the one seems 

 the representative of a beautiful idea, enthusiasm the other that of 

 a shocking one, anger. With these notions on capillary matters, I 

 need scarcely say how deeply I was disappointed in the course of 

 the scrutiny now described. 



I went home in a state of semi-extinction, threw myself on my 

 couch more dead than alive, and only revived in my sleep by dint of 

 dreaming. Methought the beauteous Perdita (for so I christened 

 her during my intelligent slumbers) floated or flitted before me, as 

 spirits are signified to do, and gladdened with her golden locks the 

 cold twilight of my mental state. After contemplating me with that 

 aspect of benignity which female loveliness is alone privileged to 

 express in its highest degree, she extended her arm movingly towards 

 me, and uttered in accents emphatic, yet soft (while the cock was 

 crowing in a contiguous back-yard), these three words " the morn- 

 ing herald !" Having thus simply said, she began to recede with 

 an aerial glide a gentle undulation, a floating grace, was discerni- 

 ble in her unsubstantial vestments, and was responded to, in myste- 

 rious sympathy, by a waving movement of my bed-curtains her 

 looks and her locks appeared to beam with a new harmony of smiling 

 light, and she vanished into thin air ! 



" She fled, I woke, and day brought back my night !" 



The disquiet of my feelings was very little soothed by this singular 

 vision, however placidly conducted for what was its tendency, what 

 its interpretation ? A benignant purpose was to be inferred from 

 the gracious manner of the sweet visitant but what purpose ? I was 

 tossed and whirled in the clouds of conjecture. Could my dear 

 Perdita (too late revealed to me, and lost too soon) have paid the 

 debt of nature, and only glanced again upon this sorrowful earth as 

 a monitress to myself a moral messenger on my unworthy behalf? 

 Was this likely on so slender an acquaintance ? True, she was as 

 familiar to me, through mental mediation, as any object that I most 

 cherished ; but then she had but once (in body corporate) set eyes 

 on me, and how did I know (not being a vain young man) that she 

 had ever thought of me afterwards ? At all events, if it was her 

 spirit that had now come, disembodied, on a reforming mission, why 

 not tell me so ? I preferred much, however, to indulge the idea that 

 it was ee a spirit of health," a cpirit belonging to a living earthly 

 tenant, how far soever it might have wandered from its owner. I 

 ventured to hope that it might have so wandered for the purpose of 



