PREPARATION FOR MARRIAGE.

Miss Lillie Ellis was sitting upstairs in her virgin bower, which was now converted into a tumultuous, seething caldron of millinery and mantua-making, such as usually precedes a wedding.  To be sure, orders had been forthwith despatched to Paris for the bridal regimentals, and for a good part of the trousseau; but that did not seem in the least to stand in the way of the time-honored confusion of sewing preparations at home, which is supposed to waste the strength and exhaust the health of every bride elect.

Whether young women, while disengaged, do not have proper under-clothing, or whether they contemplate marriage as an awful gulf which swallows up all future possibilities of replenishing a wardrobe,—­certain it is that no sooner is a girl engaged to be married than there is a blind and distracting rush and pressure and haste to make up for her immediately a stock of articles, which, up to that hour, she has managed to live very comfortably and respectably without.  It is astonishing to behold the number of inexpressible things with French names which unmarried young ladies never think of wanting, but which there is a desperate push to supply, and have ranged in order, the moment the matrimonial state is in contemplation.

Therefore it was that the virgin bower of Lillie was knee-deep in a tangled mass of stuffs of various hues and description; that the sharp sound of tearing off breadths resounded there; that Miss Clippins and Miss Snippings and Miss Nippins were sewing there day and night; that a sewing-machine was busily rattling in mamma’s room; and that there were all sorts of pinking and quilling, and braiding and hemming, and whipping and ruffling, and over-sewing and cat-stitching and hem-stitching, and other female mysteries, going on.

As for Lillie, she lay in a loose neglige on the bed, ready every five minutes to be called up to have something measured, or tried on, or fitted; and to be consulted whether there should be fifteen or sixteen tucks and then an insertion, or sixteen tucks and a series of puffs.  Her labors wore upon her; and it was smilingly observed by Miss Clippins across to Miss Nippins, that Miss Lillie was beginning to show her “engagement bones.”  In the midst of these preoccupations, a letter was handed to her by the giggling chambermaid.  It was a thick letter, directed in a bold honest hand.  Miss Lillie took it with a languid little yawn, finished the last sentences in a chapter of the novel she was reading, and then leisurely broke the seal and glanced it over.  It was the one that the enraptured John had spent his morning in writing.

“Miss Ellis, now, if you’ll try on this jacket—­oh!  I beg your pardon,” said Miss Clippins, observing the letter, “we can wait, of course;” and then all three laughed as if something very pleasant was in their minds.

“No,” said Lillie, giving the letter a toss; “it’ll keep;” and she stood up to have a jaunty little blue jacket, with its pluffy bordering of swan’s down, fitted upon her.