will stop at any thing to take it from you? The facts are now before you clearly, the necessity plainly demonstrated.....I begin again......Behold, anew I offer you my hand in exchange for your fortune: decide Amelia, or in an hour all Paris shall know how it was obtained."

MY GRANDMOTHER'S KEYS.

"In tenui labor, at tenuis non gloria."

THERE is one point to which I would draw the attention of the gudewives of the present day, and that is, to my "Grandmother's Keys." I say

nothing of the pocket-nor of the scissors, nor of the pincushion-but I come at once, and for the sake of unity—the parent, they tell us, of interest -to speak of the "keys." These keys hung suspended from my grandmother's zone with a grace and freedom which could never be overlooked; amongst them there prevailed the most complete republican equality-from him, the lord of the cellar, even down to her, the tiny regulator

of the time-piece. It was a kind of Jack Goodfellow golden age, when great and small, important and unimportant, rusted and ward-worn, met together and fondly embraced, united in the same jingle, and bobbed at the same step. Like the human faculties, as described by our worthy faculty-mongers, these keys rested upon a background of complete unity; yet, whenever circumstances called them into play, they were ever separately and individually at hand, ready to execute the appropriate task assigned to them.

But how are the keys managed now-a-days? -for this, after all, is the matter of discourse and inquiry. Is the above beautiful and convenient arrangement adopted? or is another, and if any other, a better or a worse, adopted in its stead? I hate the German Illuminati, and the French Revolution, and lament the decay of the age of chivalry and respect for loyalty; and this I do, not only on the score that, by means of such unhallowed agencies, society has been torn from its moorings, and dashed into a thousand separate and independent fragments, but that along with, and I verily believe in sympathy with, these events, my grandmother's keys have broken from their ring and been dispersed. They have, in fact, become, since the period alluded to, a kind of refugees-unconnected, ununited, insubordinate and useless-never at hand unless when not wanted, and always a-seeking when most required.

You look

upon that three-cornered and tesselated piece of net-work or velvet, commonly called a reticule, but you may save yourself the trouble of search, the keys are not there: and if not there, where can they be? not, assuredly, on the person of the mistress, for on her whole person, from head-dress to shoe-point, there is neither lap, pocket, nor fastening. The keys would escape from her like a drop of water over the burning face of a tailor's goose; she would absolutely faint at the imputation of any thing so gothic as a key, a pocket, or a pincushion, on her person: ornament has superseded and banished utility; and, in the scuffle, the associated keys have run riot, and become entirely unmanageable. You may call spirits, but will they come?

You may

sing out from morn to night, "Nanny! Mary!?-Jane! Tibby! bring me my

what's

your name

napery-press key! you will find it on the side