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ROMANCE AND REALITY.

brave the balls and bullets of "outrageous fortune;" and the last few years at Paris, a slave to the slender ankle and superlative suppers of an Opera-dancer. Her reform, in a convent, and the necessity of raising his rents, brought the Colonel to England. Soon after his arrival, that patent axletree of action, the not knowing what to do with himself, domesticated him during some weeks of the shooting season at Sillery House, where, not being a sportsman, all the benefit he derived from September was having his morning's sleep disturbed, and seeing partridges that would have made the most exquisite of sautés, drenched with an infantine-looking pap called bread sauce.

His attention, among the red-cheeked, red-handed, and large-eared race, that formed the olive plantation around his cousin's table, was drawn to his namesake, Francis Boyne Sillery, by one day missing from his dressing-table a large portion of the most exquisite scent, with which he endeavoured to counteract the atmosphere of goose and gunpowder that filled Sillery House.

Mischief in a large family, like murder in the newspapers, is sure to come out. It was soon discovered that Master Francis, having his deli-