lover—­finding a mistress in every port.  It is woman’s nature and wisdom to seek consolation for such afflictions as the deprivation of the beloved one’s society, and the almost certainty that he is basking his faithless self in the sunlight of another’s eyes.  Our heroine, being at once ardent and philosophical, put the lex talionis into force by falling in love with one of her mother’s lodgers, a sprig of the legal profession.  The favored youth—­so says my edition of the romance—­remained preternaturally unconscious of the sentiment he had inspired, attributing her manifestations of partiality to platonic regard, until she opened his modest eyes by proposing an elopement.  He had completed his professional studies, taken out a license to practise law, was about to quit her and the city, and the no-longer-adored Julius was coming home—­a wreck in health and purse—­upon a six months’ leave of absence.  It must be owned the Lady Louise had some excuse for a measure that seemed to have amazed and horrified her cicisbeo.  Recoiling from the proposition and herself with the virtuous indignation that is ever aroused in the manly bosom by similar advances, he packed up his trunk, double-locked it and his heart, paid his bill, and decamped from the dangerous precincts.

“Ignoble conclusion to a tender affair; but not so devoid of tragicality as would seem.  Infuriated at the desertion of this modern Joseph, Louise, the lorn, avenged the slight offered her charms by declaring to her youngest brother, the only one who resided in the same city with herself, that Joseph had made dishonorable proposals to her—­a proceeding which demonstrates that the feminine character has withstood the proverbially changing effects of time from age to age.  My narrative is but a later and a Gentile version of the Jewish novelette to which I have referred.  The role of Potiphar was cast for the unsophisticated brother, who, being unable to immure the unimpressible Joseph in the Tombs, attempted the only means of redress that remained to him, to wit:  Personal chastisement.

“And here,” continued the narrator, yet more slowly, “I find myself perplexed by the discrepancy between the statement I have had to-day and one of this section of the story furnished me several years since.  In the latter the indignant fraternal relative flogged the would-be betrayer within a quarter of an inch of his life.  The other account reverses the position of the parties, and makes Joseph the incorruptible also the invincible.  However this may have been, the adventure seems to have quenched the loving Louise’s brilliancy for a season.  We hear no more of her until after her father’s decease, when she re-enters the lists of Cupid in another State, as the blushing and still beautiful virgin-betrothed of a man of birth and means, who woos and weds her under her maiden cognomen—­the entire family, including the valiant brother who figured as whippee or whipper, in the castigation exploit—­being