blushed, and smiled, and kissed her hand; a
gesture replied to by Mr. Corbet with much
empressement, while the other man only took off
his hat, almost as if he saw her there for the first
time. Ellinor's greedy eyes watched him till he
was hidden from sight in the deanery, unheeding
Miss Monro's eager incoherent sentences, in turn
entreating, apologising, comforting, and upbraiding.
Then she slowly turned her painful eyes
upon Miss Monro's face, and moved her lips
without a sound being heard, and fainted dead
away. In all her life she had never done it
before, and when she came round she was not
like herself; in all probability the persistence
and wilfulness she, who was usually so meek and
docile, showed during the next twenty-four hours,
was the consequence of fever. She resolved to
be present at the wedding: numbers were
going; she would be unseen, unnoticed in the
crowd; but whatever befel, go she would, and
neither the tears nor the prayers of Miss Monro
could keep her back. She gave no reason for
this determination; indeed, in all probability she
had none to give; so there was no arguing the
point. She was inflexible to entreaty, and no
one had any authority over her except, perhaps,
distant Mr. Ness. Miss Monro had all sorts of
forebodings as to the possible scenes that might
come to pass. But all went on as quietly, as
though the fullest sympathy pervaded every
individual of the great numbers assembled. No one
guessed that the muffled veiled figure, sitting in
the shadow behind one of the great pillars, was
that of one who had once hoped to stand at the
altar with the same bridegroom; who now cast
tender looks at the beautiful bride; her veil white
and fairy-like, Ellinor's black and shrouding as
that of any nun.

Already Mr. Corbet's name was known through
the country as that of a great lawyer; people
discussed his speeches and character far and
wide; and the well-informed in legal gossip
spoke of him as sure to be offered a judgeship at
the next vacancy. So he, though grave, and
middle-aged, and somewhat grey, divided attention
and remark with his lovely bride, and her
pretty train of cousin bridesmaids. Miss Monro
need not have feared for Ellinor: she saw and
heard all things as in a mist—a dream; as
something she had to go through, before she could
waken up to a reality of brightness in which her
youth, and the hopes of her youth, should be
restored, and all these weary years of dreaminess
and woe should be revealed as nothing but the
nightmare of a night. She sat motionless
enough, still enough, Miss Monro by her, watching
her as intently as a keeper watches a
mad-man, and with the same purpose—to prevent
any outburst even by bodily strength, if such
restraint be needed. When all was over, when
the principal personages of the ceremony had
filed into the vestry to sign their names; when the
swarm of towns-people were going out as swiftly
as their individual notions of the restraints of
the sacred edifice permitted; when the great
chords of the "Wedding March" clanged out
from the organ, and the loud bells pealed
overhead, Eliinor laid her hand in Miss Monro's.
"Take me home," she said, softly. And Miss
Monro led her home as one leads the blind.

HOW OLD ARE WE?

DEALERS in ancient dates have broken down.
SIR G. C. LEWIS has thrust a relentless broom
into the cobwebs of the Egyptologist. We are
not so deep as we supposed ourselves in the
secrets of Babylon. Revenge! If the stones
above the earth are misread, let us look at the
stones under the earth. What are these chipped
flints? Let us search under the water, also. What
are these curious remains of primeval villages in
the beds of great lakes? If we had but a trusty
guide! So much has been talked lately, about
the antiquity and ancestry of man, that one
would like very well to see the grounds of all
the discussion. And, happily for us, just at the
time when everybody has become curious, forth
steps SIR CHARLES LYELL, one of the soundest
and most reasonable of geologists that have been,
or that are. In him we have known, aforetime,
the great opponent of sensational geology,
whereby the tale of the earth's life is made
harrowing with a series of shocks, cataclysms, and
vast peril by fire and flood—here, the abrupt
sensation header of a continent into the sea, there,
the uptossing of an Andes chain as if it were a
fritter, followed by a general explosion of
volcanoes and unlimited illumination with red fire.
Great comfort it is to us that this shrewd
enemy to scientific fustian, has appeared as our
guide to the lakes and caves lately become
fashionable among men of science, in a book on
The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of
Man, which (published by John Murray)
appeared only a tew days ago.

It is of no use to look very deep for evidences
of the age of man. Human remains are not to be
found in the latest series of fossil-bearing strata,
the tertiary; neither in its older layers of
eocene, which show the dawn of an appearance
of existing sorts of shells; nor in the miocene,
which contain a few such shells; nor in the
latest pliocene, which contain more. It is only
in the new settlements, at the top of all these,
the post-tertiary, that remains of man are to be
looked for. We may be content, therefore, to
know nothing about coral rag and muschel kalk.
No matter, though we are not geologists.
Anybody can sink in a bog, and, at the beginning of
our travel in search of information, that is all we
have to do. Swallowed alive in a Danish peat-bog,
we are to notice, as we sink, the different sorts
of vegetable matter we pass through. The Danish
peat-bogs are from ten to thirty feet deep, and lie
in the hollows of a boulder formation. Trunks
of Scotch fir, some of them three feet thick, lie at
different depths in the borders of the bog, where
they have fallen as they grew about its edge. The
Scotch fir has not grown in the Danish islands
within historical times, and will not thrive when
introduced there. But there were men in