Too Good a Housewife.
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hat a lovely looking bride was Rhoda
Fielding ! What a spring-like aspect
she had ! What an embodiment of
bloom and freshness she seemed! That round,
smooth face, tinted like an apple blossom, that
furrowless brow, (somewhat too low and narrow,
but redeemed by rich clusters of chestnut curls,)
those cloudless eyes and velvety lips, theirs was the
beauty of untried youth ; beauté du diable, as it is too
expressively called by the French. Then Rhoda
was so artless, so frank-hearted, so unsophisticated!
just what Edmund Fielding most admired in woman-
hood. Charmed by the glittering surface of the
stream it was but natural that he never dived be-
neath, to note what shells, or pebbles, lay within
its channel, ready to be cast up by the surging tide
of matrimony. He had yearned for the first, pure,
uncalculating affection of a guileless maiden, and
that he had won. A man of cultivated mind and
highly intellectual tastes, he expected to find in his
youthful wife a plastic, genial and appreciating
companion ; but whether Rhoda's mental attributes,
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