was fixed, but Suzette had not yet bought her wedding clothes.  She hastened to tell her lover that their marriage must be deferred, as she wanted the price of her bridal finery to lay her uncle decently in the grave.  Her mistress ridiculed the idea, and exhorted her to leave the old man to be buried by charity.  Suzette refused.  The consequence was a quarrel, in which the young woman lost at once her place and her lover, who sided with her mistress.  She hastened to the miserable garret where her uncle had expired, and by the sacrifice not only of her wedding attire, but of nearly all the rest of her slender wardrobe, she had the old man decently interred.  Her pious task fulfilled, she sat alone in her uncle’s room weeping bitterly, when the master of her faithless lover, a young good-looking man, entered.  “So, my good Suzette, I find you have lost your place!” cried he, “I am come to offer you one for life—­will you marry me?” “I, Sir? you are joking.”  “No, indeed, I want a wife, and I am sure I can’t find a better.”  “But everybody will laugh at you for marrying a poor girl like me,” “Oh! if that is your only objection we shall soon get over it; come, come along; my mother is prepared to receive you.”  Suzette hesitated no longer; but she wished to take with her a memorial of her deceased uncle:  it was a cat that he had kept for many years.  The old man was so fond of the animal that he was determined even death should not separate them, and he had caused her to be stuffed and placed near his bed.  As Suzette took puss down, she uttered an exclamation of surprise at finding her so heavy.  The lover hastened to open the animal, when out fell a shower of gold.  There were a thousand louis concealed in the body of the cat, and this sum, which the old man had contrived to amass, became the just reward of the worthy girl and her disinterested lover.

Integrity.—­A Parisian stock-broker, just before his death, laid a wager on parole with a rich capitalist; and a few weeks after his death, the latter visited the widow and gave her to understand that her late husband had lost a wager of sixteen thousand francs.  She went to her secretary, took out her pocket-book, and counted bank notes to the stated amount, when the capitalist thus addressed her:  “Madame, as you give such convincing proof that you consider the wager binding, I have to pay you sixteen thousand francs.  Here is the sum, for I am the loser, and not your husband.”

During the speculations of 1837-38, Mr. C., a young merchant of Philadelphia, possessed of a handsome fortune, caught the mania, entered largely into its operations, and for a time was considered immensely rich.  But when the great revulsion occurred he was suddenly reduced to bankruptcy.  His young wife immediately withdrew from the circles of wealth and fashion, and adapted her expenses, family and personal, to her altered circumstances.  At the time of Mr. C.’s failure, his wife was in debt to Messrs.