The Collegians

beauties in a higher rank, ran, after all, a fair chance of becoming what Lady Mary Montague has elegantly termed "a lay nun." Even so a bookworm, who will pore over a single volume from morning till night, if turned loose into a library, wanders from shelf to shelf, bewildered amid a host of temptations, and unable to make any election until he is surprised by twilight, and chagrined to find, that with so much happiness within his grasp, he has spent, nevertheless, an unprofitable day.

But accident saved Eily from a destiny so deeply dreaded and so often lamented as that above alluded to,-a condition which people generally agree to look upon as one of utter desolation, and which, notwithstanding, is frequently a state of greater happiness than its opposite. On the even of the seventeenth of March, a day distinguished in the rope-maker's household, not only as the festival of the national Saint, but as the birth-day of the young mistress of the establishment; on this evening, Eily and her father were e