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Whether Miss Lucinda’s winter dress suggested this floral metaphor let us not inquire. Sacred be sentiment, when there is even a shadow of reality about it!—when it becomes a profession, and confounds itself with millinery and shades of mourning, it is—”bosh,” as the Turkeys say.

So that very evening Monsieur Leclerc arrayed himself in his best, to give another lesson to Miss Lucinda. But, somehow or other, the lesson was long in beginning; the little parlor looked so home-like and so pleasant, with its bright lamp and gay bunch of roses on the table, that it was irresistible temptation to lounge and linger. Miss Lucinda had the volume of Florian in her hands, and was wondering why he did not begin, when the book was drawn away, and a hand laid on both of hers.

“Lucinda!” he began, “I give you no lesson to-night. I have to ask. Dear Mees, will you to marry your poor slave?”

“O dear!” said Miss Lucinda.

Don’t laugh at her, Miss Tender-eyes! You will feel just so yourself some day, when Alexander Augustus says, “Will you be mine, loveliest of your sex?” only you won’t feel it half so strongly, for you are young, and love is Nature to youth, but it is a heavenly surprise to age.

Monsieur Leclerc said nothing. He had a heart after all, and it was touched now by the deep emotion that flushed Miss Lucinda’s face, and made her tremble so violently,—but presently he spoke.

“Do not!” said he.”I am wrong. I presume. Forgive the stranger!”

“O dear!” said poor Lucinda again,—”O, you know it isn’t that! but how can you like me? “

There, Mademoiselle! there’s humility for you! you will never say that to Alexander Augustus!

Monsieur Leclerc soothed this frightened, happy, incredulous little woman into quiet before very long; and if he really began to feel a true affection for her from the moment he perceived her humble and entire devotion to him, who shall blame him? Not I. If we were all heroes, who would be valet-de-chambre? if we were all women, who would be men? He was very good as far as he went; and if you expect the chivalries of grace out of Nature, you “may expect,” as old Fuller saith. So it was peacefully settled that they should be married, with a due amount of tears and smiles on Lucinda’s part, and a great deal of tender sincerity on Monsieur’s. She missed her dancing-lesson next day, and when Monsieur Leclerc came in the evening he found a shade on her happy face.

“O dear!” said she, as he entered.

“O dear!” was Lucinda’s favorite aspiration. Had she thought of it as an Anglicizing of ” O Dieu! ” perhaps she would have dropped it; but this time she went on headlong, with a valorous despair,—

“I have thought of something! I’m afraid I can’t! Monsieur, aren’t you a Romanist?”

“What is that?” said he, surprised.

“A Papist,—a Catholic!”

“Ah!” he returned, sighing, “once I was bon Catholique, —once in my gone youth; after then I was nothing but the poor man who bats for his life; now I am of the religion that shelters the stranger and binds up the broken poor.”

Monsieur was a diplomatist. This melted Miss Lucinda’s orthodoxy right down; she only said,—

“Then you will go to church with me?”

“And to the skies above, I pray,” said Monsieur, kissing her knotty hand like a lover.

So in the earliest autumn they were married, Monsieur having previously presented Miss Lucinda with a delicate plaided gray silk for her wedding attire, in which she looked almost young; and old Israel was present at the ceremony, which was briefly performed by Parson Hyde in Miss Manners’s parlor. They did not go to Niagara, nor to Newport; but that afternoon Monsieur Leclerc brought a hired rockaway to the door, and took his bride a drive into the country. They stopped beside a pair of bars, where Monsieur hitched his horse, and, taking Lucinda by the hand, led her into Farmer Steele’s orchard, to the foot of his biggest apple-tree. There she beheld a little mound, at the head and foot of which stood a daily rose-bush shedding its latest wreaths of bloom, and upon the mound itself was laid a board on which she read,—”Here lie the bones of poor Piggy.”