called drafts, or abstruse and many cornered patterns. Mrs. Braxley, who had as much energy as Bonaparte, always made large tobacco crops, engaged her own overseer, and turned him off midway between January and Christmas, if he did not walk exactly to suit her; grew her own corn and wheat; raised her own pork, beeves, and fowls; and was always in advance of her neighbors, in green peas and fried chicken. She was a tall, fine woman of forty; standing erect and independent, with a sun-burnt face and clear gray eye; speaking quickly, and to the point; dressing neatly and compactly, not even bending to that female tyrant, fashion, but choosing, year after year, after a pattern of her own invention. Her sleeves were large enough to roll up over the elbows; her skirts short enough not to sweep the yard, or to interfere with Mrs. Braxley in going up any flight of steps, however formidable. Her caps were made with an eye to a weekly washing; her shoes ample and double-soled. Mrs.

Braxley often boasted that fashion came to her once in seven years, and that she never had a corn; and, though her family was a gouty family, and she might add a corny family, yet she defied both. This lady, as the reader already perceives, was a worthy daughter of Mrs. Barbara, though she had none of Mrs. Barbara's weaknesses, viz., love of family, style, big names, fortunes, and Paris fashions. Mrs. Braxley despised pretension and display, and entertained a sovereign contempt, to use her own expression, for the "fag end of a big family." But one defect had this model female; I cannot call it a weakness, for Mrs. Braxley had no weaknesses. One defect had she, which I cannot conscientiously pass over in silence. My beloved reader, will you believe it?—this neat, orderly, sin-exterminating woman, rubbed snuff! She kept a snuff-box in her right pocket, filled with the strongest and most pungent Scotch snuff'; and she went about all day, brandishing a dangerous-looking hickory stick, with a mop end, which she was constantly dipping into this huge black horn snuff-box, and loading with snuff, which I am sorry to say was duly deposited in Mrs. Braxley's mouth. This horrible practice, called in lower Virginia and North Carolina, dipping, is of respectable standing. I have known many dippers in my life, who, like my aunt Braxley, had but that one fault; and I must halt just here, in my description of my aunt, to pay my respects to "dipping." Ladies who confess to "taking a dip," are, I am sorry to say, exceedingly ferocious on the subject. They repel indignantly any attack upon this favorite and genial

pursuit. Beautiful creatures, with rosy, perfumed mouths, will grow restless at "dipping time," and will cautiously desert lover, husband, father, or friend, at the established dipping hour; to draw out, in some snug retreat, these formidable and nauseous-looking hickory sticks, with mop ends, and fill their delicate mouths with load after load, of horrid Scotch snuff! That estimable lady, who, after kissing her own cow, turned around and proclaimed to astonished mankind, "de gustibus non est disputandum," surely had the gift of second sight, and must have had her prophetic eye upon troops of dippers, away down in the vista of time, gliding off with nimble step to this remarkable pursuit.

Forgive me, dippers, if I have played the spy in your midst. Forgive me if I have approached your sancta with a potent hickory wand, and been injudiciously admitted. Forgive me for having, with grave visage, followed your example, and walloped my mop-stick deep in your black horn boxes, that I might get the "hang' of this delightful recreation. Forgive me for saying, that I have seen you giving each other the wink at dipping-time, and stealing off one by one, with innocent faces and compressed smiles, to range yourselves à les regles in compact circles, around brisk winter fires, or in back summer piazzas, and then luxuriously dipping -dipping-dipping.

66

By simply arming herself with a hickory stick, and boldly penetrating the charmed circle of these dippers, the curious reader can see human nature in a new light. She (for no gentleman is ever admitted, under any circumstances) will hear ladies inviting ladies to come over and take a dip." She will see them grouped together, with handkerchiefs spread over their laps, snuff-boxes open, and mops at work, dipping, the sly happy creatures! at the maddest rate. Unfortunately, my curious reader will find that they do not confine their dippings to their black horn boxes; they sometimes dip into their friends! The stimulative weed excites these ladies, and they unbosom themselves, spin the longest yarns, open the darkest pages, and dip-and dip-and dip.

"Dippers" are of gregarious habits, going in herds, communicating by signs, and bound together in long unbroken chains. They will face any danger to meet an appointment, and would go through a brush fire to rub their teeth, and wag their heads and chat. Woe be to the absent dipper in such dangerous times. Woe be to her if the community cannot furnish a murder, or a run-away match, or a jealous husband, or a monster of

some kind, for the entertainment—these dippers will most assuredly dip into her!

Sometimes we find a small band of dippers cast into a highly dangerous and anti-dipping community. Public opinion is against dipping; husbands and fathers are against dipping; young men are against dipping. Under these unfavorable circumstances they unite into secret societies, concealing their boxes and mops, abusing the weed publicly and vehemently, resorting to private signs, appointing rendezvous, meeting, mid hairbreadth escapes and thrilling adventures-and then, oh! such royal dips! Dipping into every thing. Dipping into the so-and-so's, and the everybody's, with a vengeance! Dipping into families and friends, probing the sorest wounds with these mopped sticks; brandishing their weapons more and more fiercely, until, from the stimulating effects of the weed, they turn against their own husbands, and relate such matrimonial trials as would still every mop for reflection!

Mrs. Braxley was a leading dipper; an independent go-ahead dipper; from whom many timid dippers plucked a little courage.

Mrs. Braxley would brandish her tooth-brush in the President's face, if provoked to it; and a brave commanderin-chief was she.

Poor Louise would have been very comfortably located, had it not been for uncle Joe, the meek husband of the abovementioned.

It seems that uncle Joe had been a gay rollicking blade in his youth, and that Mrs. Barbara had considered him rather beneath her daughter, and had opposed the match, "solely upon aristocratic grounds," to use her own expression; but finally, in consideration of Phoebe's low forehead and freckles, she graciously consented. Thereupon, uncle Joe, in his usual rash and inconsiderate manner, rushed young, high-spirited, and unbroken, into the matrimonial yoke, and found himself secured for life! I need not say that he was completely broken in a fleeting twelvemonth.

The daughter of Mrs. Barbara asserted and maintained her rights with a high hand. Year after year found her still gaining upon the enemy (Uncle Joe), who retreated and retreated, and being also seized with a furious rheumatism, he seized his pipe and took his corner, and was no more like the dashing Joe Braxley of the olden time, than he was like a gaudy war elephant of Siam. His wants were few and his pleasures were fewer. Half his time was spent in acute rheumatic pain, by which he was shockingly drawn: and the other half was divided in

sharp lookings-out for east winds, friendly chattings with friends, and vigorous rubbings with pungent liniments and bearlike gloves, to keep the rheumatism at bay. Ah, could that young lady, who in bygone romantic days had so loved uncle Joe, and who had taken out to Alabama a broken heart, to be healed by gentle southern breezes; could she but see the gay young heart-breaker now! Her youthful dream would, alas, be broken, quite as effectually as was her heart. She would see, instead of her crisp-locked ideal, a bald-headed, plethoric, mild mannered man, sitting in his corner with his pipe, or with his bristly gloves and liniments, intently rubbing his knee joints! What a picture for a broken heart! What a finale for greedy romance to digest!

Still, there was an old twinkle in the corner of the eye, and a keen relish for a joke, and the echo of a once boisterous and hearty laugh, which pertinaciously clung to uncle Joe, and a few sparks of the old fire, which had resisted all the dampers of matrimony, which shone forth now and then, and made this hymeneal and rheumatic captive appear a jocund man at times.

Time's gorgeous panorama moved slowly on. The spring had budded and blossomed. The summer had blushed and deepened and passed away, and the flaunting crimson cloud-land, with its burnished splendors, had sobered and grown gray, and faded, and old Time was in the sere and yellow leaf. Young hearts were subdued, and old affections mellowed. Louise's exile was not yet over. She was, by papa's order, still pining in Mrs. Braxley's dominions. I hope my reader knows something of love. How he mocks at frowns and barriers. How young lovers, though separated, can wait, and hope, and bear up stoutly against all cruelty, and endure a variety of hardships and crosses, in a manner which must seem somewhat surprising to them after they have attained the object of their wishes. We all know how danger only stimulates young lovers; and how opposition will often change quite a commonplace and lukewarm passion into an heroic and sublime affair. How absence and parental tyranny have done more for the wily god than all the arrows in his quiver. How the beloved in absence can be easily decked with many imaginary beauties and graces, which his constant presence would too wofully dissipate. How one stolen interview is of more value to a lover than fifty unrebuked and prolonged sittings. In short, how Cupid only enlists obstinate parents in his service, and makes them fight blindly against themselves.

Louise was pining in Siberia. The Siberian monarch, Mrs. Braxley, was gone with her sceptre of hickory to a neighbor's, to dip. Uncle Joe and Louise were drawn up around a three-legged table, on which mildly and lambently shone Mrs. Braxley's parlor lamp. Uncle Joe sat with bits of soft wood lying on the table, which he was fashioning with his pen-knife into all sorts of shapes; his bald head shining amid his iron-gray locks, like a soft shrouded moon. Louise sat indolently rocking in a large blue chair, absorbed in thought.

"What is the matter, Louise? You are terribly moped about something," said uncle Joe, scooping out the rim of a wooden punch bowl.

Nothing," said Louise, listlessly. "Nothing but Dashwood. That fellow is always uppermost in your thoughts. You had better dismiss him, and take Farren; at least so Mrs. Barbara and all these clever women think. They say Dashwood is incorrigible."

66 Do you think so?" Louise asked. "My dear, do not ask me; I do not know. They say he is wasting the finest talents in the State, and that he hasn't the stability even to make a start in life." 66 Ah, but he has," said my sister. "I have my doubts. I should dislike to see you throwing yourself away upon a fellow, who, it seems, can be any thing, and will be nothing."

"I tell you," said Louise, turning to the light, and raising a pair of lustrous eyes, "I tell you he has the strength to be any thing. He has the noblest heart in the world; and I-I have sounded its lowest depths. I cannot believe such glorious gifts can perish, any more than a sunbeam can be drowned in the sea. You have only to look upon his countenance and believe. You have only to look and see the great light shining on his brow. Ah, the light gilds up the highest peaks, does it not? Well, uncle Joe, it is there!" "Youth, youth," said uncle Joe, in a sad funereal note.

"But let me say it now, uncle Joe. Let me say it only once, that I may not break my word. If he fail, if he perish, if he fall-then I fail, and I perish, and I fall, too!"

"Stop, girl! Pray don't!" cried uncle Joe, casting an alarmed look around; for that good man had been taught, and firmly believed, that walls had ears, particularly Mrs. Braxley's walls.

"Don't be rash; I beg you don't be rash. You'll repent it as sure as you live," said uncle Joe, really alarmed at her remarks.

"They are going to oppose me,"continued Louise steadily, while uncle Joe cut away

furiously upon his punch bowl. "I see them banding together-papa, grandma, all but mamma and dear Robert-but II cannot give him up."

As Louise expressed herself thus, her face glowing and her eye glittering beneath the serene globe of the lamp, and her countenance radiant with that divine fortitude possessed by some women in such heavenly perfection, Dashwood, who held the door ajar, bounded in. He caught her to his breast, and then paid his respects to uncle Joe, by squeezing him in his arms until he cried out, and then he danced several times around the table, and finally he drew up beneath the lamp, and informed his hearers that he was the happiest man alive. He begged leave to repeat it, and most forcibly to impress it upon them, that, "recent events, together with the absence of a respectable lady, whose image often filled their hearts,' said Dashwood, his eye gleaming with its comic fire, "have conspired to render me the most supremely happy man in the world."

Uncle Joe slapped his rheumatic knees, and laughed at the bare idea of a certain person's absence contributing to any body's happiness. He regarded it as a capital idea, a facetious and mirth-provoking conceit, that allusion to the timely absence of the lady who so often filled their hearts. He hadn't "shook the cobwebs " at such a rate since the last time, one snug evening, after tea, it was, when Dashwood boldly walked in at one door as she walked out at the other, and after making his bow to the retiring figure, he demurely stretched himself out upon her vacant chair, and proceeded to lament her absence, in low pathetic modulations.

Poor Dashwood had such twinkling comic eyes, and could put on such grave, queer faces, that uncle Joe could never resist his sallies. Indeed, uncle Joe enjoyed these stolen visits, and though he cried out fudge and fiddlesticks, he wickedly delighted in the perils which this courageous fellow encountered, with such admirable ease and assurance. The greatest and most bitter enemy the persecuted lover could boast, was Mrs. Braxley, and his greatest admirer the timid, but once rash, uncle Joe. Therefore, uncle Joe always shook the reckless dashing fellow warmly by the hand, and invariably invited him to look in upon them on snug evenings, with the emphasis as I have marked; though uncle Joe knew it was as much as his head was worth to give that invitation.

The reader sees how these Phoebean territories were invaded by love, and how this Cassanova-like Dashwood, was ever

"Nevertheless, you cannot guess what I have to tell you!" exclaimed the animated lover, nothing daunted.

"Fudge!" muttered uncle Joe, hobbling across the room for his pipe. "Do you give it up?" "Yes-"

"Well, I am appointed attaché to an embassy at the Court of St. Cloud!!" cried Dashwood, jumping up.

"And a precious attaché you will be," said uncle Joe, filling the bowl of his pipe. "What do you think of that?" asked Dashwood, his face beaming with delight.

"I think our Goverment has gone mad, if it dreams of attaching you to any thing," said uncle Joe, from his fog in the corner.

"Ha! ha! ha! I am very much attached to some things. But I am going to cross the waters, bless your soul, uncle Joe! To Rome! think of that—to Paris-does not that startle you? To London! How often have you taken me to London by the ears, until I squealed, uncle Joe? Am I to behold the skies of Italy, the Coliseum, the Sistine Chapel, the Venus, the Campagna, and the Carnival? Am I to hear the Miserere-and stand upon the Rialto! oh! Louise, darling girl, am I reserved for this!"

"Am I," continued Dashwood, after a pause, "to be kindly snatched by Providence, from pleasures and temptations, which I am too weak to resist? Am I to be taken from my old companions, who are reckless, extravagant and rich, while I am reckless, extravagant and poor, because my struggles have been seen by a pitying eye, while I was too proud to admit that I had struggled, and had been conquered? Are efforts which have been made with an earnest, but hopeless heart, to be at length rewarded? Are old associations, which would cling to me, to be broken by a stronger hand than mine?" And the lover's eye was moist, and there was a mellow glow upon his face, which was of heaven. "Heigho!" he said, pausing again, "Bob dislikes to give me up, and all the fellows dislike to give me up, and some of the girls, eh Louise? declare

they cannot give me up, but this will be the making of me. This will break up old habits and old associations, but not old loves, remember, and it is to be the making of me. We have been trying for months to secure this appointment. Bob, poor fellow, has toiled like a capitalist, and corresponded like a Home Secretary, about this attaché-ship for me. And now we've got it, and I rushed in to tell you. I brushed Mrs. Braxley's respectable sleeve on the road, to tell you this; I invaded her jail, and scared my dear uncle Joe, to tell him this!"

Again there was silence, and uncle Joe, as the wreathing smoke coiled itself fantastically above his head, was heard to murmur "too rash, too rash," and puffed on.

"Now," continued Dashwood, "Mrs. Braxley, estimable lady, can dip on, if she will only refrain from dipping into me. Uncle Joe, I shall leave my girl with you. If Tom Farren come near her, do you chunk him with your crutch with my compliments. If Mrs. Braxley attempt to entice her away from me, speak up for me uncle Joe. Speak up, and say how I have ever esteemed Mrs. Braxley, you know how I have never failed to bemoan her absence in mournful numbers, on all accidental occasions like the present. How I have secured this appointment by Herculean feats, of which she did not deem me capable. How, in my heart, I cannot blame her for her jealous watching of my Louise. How I wish I could only engage her services on my side until I return. How I honor and respect her, and lament my own unworthiness. How I shall leave my native land with the determination never to return until I can come worthy of her good opinion. Will you tell her this for me, uncle Joe?"

"Lord bless your soul, man,-no! It would be the rashest thing I ever did!" returned uncle Joe, puffing away vehemently. "No," continued that good man, gently relenting, "but I have had my eyes upon you, Frank, ever since you were so high;" and uncle Joe laid his hand, in a parental manner, upon the back of a chair, "ever since, with an arm no bigger than the round of this chair, you fetched the d-d schoolmaster that famous lick, plump in the black of his eye, for whipping Bob, you know. 'Twas well done for a youngster, and properly done, and I said the good metal was there. I knew the good old ring when I heard it, I said that was the genuine article. I did not think it was rash then, ah no, hang me; I wanted a pull at the Yankee bully myself, and while your mamma—rest her soul-apologized to the Yankee, and scolded you, and cried