"I see," said she, taking hold of her drawer and pulling it out, “but, husband, your six drawers are only three, each of them running through the whole width of the table and drawing out on either side. See, your drawer and mine are only one drawer with a partition across the middle and knobs on both ends; so, when you open your drawer on your side of the table, you draw mine. after it out of my reach. What shall we do if we both wish to use our drawers at the same time?”

"Do?" said the Doctor, disconcerted at this new discovery to the discredit of his ideal, "do ? do? Well, my dear," pinching his nose between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, his usual resource in such cases, "I do not know that I can tell you what we must do. But I can tell you what we must not do. We must not do what you and I have always done hitherto."

"What do you mean?" she inquired.

"Pull together, my dear. We have always pulled together. But it will not do for us to pull our drawers together. We must pull them in the spirit of compromise, in the spirit of mutual compromise, my dear Mrs. Oldham, and then this very peculiarity in the make of our drawers,—a peculiarity for which I confess I do not see any good

mechanical reason-will become, I will not say a memento to the practice of a virtue which even prudence, in a case like this, would dictate to merely selfish natures, but will become as all outward things, however trivial, do become to right loving hearts a sermon and a sacrament of

divinest charity."

The Doctor paused, inwardly elated with the gentle excitement of his small sermon. The justice of his wife's objection was palpable, and there was not a single compensating advantage. But he did not like to own that the drawers were made in this absurd way by his own special direction, from a notion they would be handier—a notion he had got, not from ever actually seeing and handling any real drawers made in this fashion, but solely from contemplating the idea-image in his mind's eye.

He was glad to get off from the subject. But the truth is that, from this time,

The glory and the gleam,

The consecration and the poet's dream,

began to fade from his realized ideal. He began to see his table through his wife's eyes. At length every time he looked at the long square-cornered

thing, with its shining bronze imitation leather top, he saw it was not the thing he ought to have ordered. It was too large for the room, though he was still sure it was not too large for them all to sit at together; still, as a matter of proportion and good looks, it was too large; its shape was bad; and it looked too much like a "bank table "-he could not but confess it to himself, although he had felt that to be the unkindest cut in his wife's speech. He could not but secretly think how much better a nicely proportioned oval table, with a rich cloth cover of suitable color, would look.

But he had never brought himself to acknowledge it to her in a full, frank way, before this evening; because it was only this evening that he had got fairly over the chagrin and soreness of having the glory so torn from the vision of his long dreams. But to night he felt no difficulty in making the admission.

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Mrs. Oldham, my dear," said he, as they were drawing up to the table, "you were right. This is not the table we should have had. It is too large. It is not the right shape. It does look too much like a bank table."

Husband," said she, in her kind placid voicethere was no triumph, no gratified vanity in her tone

or look, any more than in her honest heart-"husband, you had better have consulted me before getting it made."

"I am sure of it, my dear," answered the Doctor, "you are an oracle of practical wisdom, Mrs. Oldham ; I never neglect to obtain your advice and sanction in any matter of affairs, without finding reason to regret it in the end. But my forethoughts, you know, are very much like the Irishman's: they come afterwards. I am as full of notions as a Yankee, and as eager and incautious in realizing them as an Irishman, or, as my friend Idleman calls me, a very 'sanguinary man.' things in my life that I repented of when they were past help. But there is one thing I have never repented of."

I have done many hasty

"What is that, husband ?"

"Offering myself to you, Mrs. Oldham. You have been my good angel, my dear."

Mrs. Oldham's cheeks-still ruddy and round, though nearly a score of years had passed away since the event to which the Doctor referred-her matronly cheeks flushed slightly at this speech of her husband's; the more perhaps that not only the children and cousin Kitty were present, but also Maggie Crampton, who had come up from town on

a visit, and was sitting at the moment between the Doctor and her.

He went on, however:

"But, in regard to this table, you do not know what a shock you inflicted upon me. I have reason to say to you, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said to his dog Diamond, 'O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest what harm thou hast done me !"" "Bless me, husband, what have I done?" "Shattered my ideal.”

"Shattered your what?"

"My ideal, the vision of my mind. It is all in fragments. And the mischief you have done me, my dear, is not like that which Diamond did his master. That great philosopher could collect the scattered fragments and reproduce what Diamond had destroyed. But my ideal is irretrievable-it is shattered and lost forever."

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My dear husband," said she, in a pitying tone, "I am so sorry for your shattered ideal. But we will have a new and more beautiful one by and by. But indeed I do believe," she added, seeing the smallest trace of a twinkle in the Doctor's eye, "you are not sorry at all that you got so ugly a table made, seeing it has given you a chance to talk so much nonsense."