fasting and penance, and the substitution of magazines for missals.
"Whoso enters here leaves hope behind,"
should be the Wednesdays' motto. The deep crimson of the walls is alone enough to annihilate a thousand of the rose-coloured visions which haunted last night's quadrille. All a young lady should pray for, is a severe lingering fit of illness, to impress upon her debating lover a just feminine valuation;—fevers and agues are the best stepping-stones to the hymeneal altar.
Well; our party entered, walked and looked round,—and expressed their admiration or their censure, the former greatly preponderating; for the ladies feel they are only there on sufferance, which makes politeness a necessity. From the place they turned to the people; and when criticism is in a crowd, it is of a motley kind, and certainly not "too discreet;" for what but something ridiculous can be said about those we do not know,—and this lady with her weak wan face, and its multitude of heavy ringlets, like the Dead Sea between two weeping willows,—that gentleman with the wilful whiskers encroaching like the sands over the yellow desert of his cheek,—or that youth
