man, a third-rate coxcomb, whose first care is always to flourish a white handkerchief and brush the seat of a tight pair of black silk pantaloons which shine as if varnished.  They must have been made of the stuff called “everlasting,” or perhaps of the same piece as Christian’s garments in the Pilgrim’s Progress, for he put them on two summers ago and has not yet worn the gloss off.  I have taken a great liking to those black silk pantaloons.  But now, with nods and greetings among friends, each matron takes her husband’s arm and paces gravely homeward, while the girls also flutter away after arranging sunset walks with their favored bachelors.  The Sabbath eve is the eve of love.  At length the whole congregation is dispersed.  No; here, with faces as glossy as black satin, come two sable ladies and a sable gentleman, and close in their rear the minister, who softens his severe visage and bestows a kind word on each.  Poor souls!  To them the most captivating picture of bliss in heaven is “There we shall be white!”

All is solitude again.  But hark!  A broken warbling of voices, and now, attuning its grandeur to their sweetness, a stately peal of the organ.  Who are the choristers?  Let me dream that the angels who came down from heaven this blessed morn to blend themselves with the worship of the truly good are playing and singing their farewell to the earth.  On the wings of that rich melody they were borne upward.

This, gentle reader, is merely a flight of poetry.  A few of the singing-men and singing-women had lingered behind their fellows and raised their voices fitfully and blew a careless note upon the organ.  Yet it lifted my soul higher than all their former strains.  They are gone—­the sons and daughters of Music—­and the gray sexton is just closing the portal.  For six days more there will be no face of man in the pews and aisles and galleries, nor a voice in the pulpit, nor music in the choir.  Was it worth while to rear this massive edifice to be a desert in the heart of the town and populous only for a few hours of each seventh day?  Oh, but the church is a symbol of religion.  May its site, which was consecrated on the day when the first tree was felled, be kept holy for ever, a spot of solitude and peace amid the trouble and vanity of our week-day world!  There is a moral, and a religion too, even in the silent walls.  And may the steeple still point heavenward and be decked with the hallowed sunshine of the Sabbath morn!

THE WEDDING-KNELL.

There is a certain church, in the city of New York which I have always regarded with peculiar interest on account of a marriage there solemnized under very singular circumstances in my grandmother’s girlhood.  That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the scene, and ever after made it her favorite narrative.  Whether the edifice now standing on the same site be the identical one to which she referred I am not