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When Jenny had laid down her brush, she said,—

“Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics.”

“Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms,” said I, with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition. “Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation.”

“There papa goes with subjective and objective!” said Marianne. “For my part, I never can remember which is which.”

“I remember,” said Jenny; “it’s what our old nurse used to call internal and out-ternal,—I always remember by that.”

“Come, my dears,” said my wife, “let your father read”; so I went on as follows:—

I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill Carberry, to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed into “that undiscovered country” of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn our apprehensions.