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TAMING A SHREW.

CHAPTER I.

DAMON AND PYTHIAS.

ALL honour to travelling. It is the modern panacea for all ills, bodily and mental; if the life gets a twist, or the heart a break, off we are packed to France or Italy

-with the idea that the cure for either ill, will meet us on the road. Vaughan Dacres and Algernon Greville had been taking a pedestrian tour through Switzerland. The

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former with a view to trying the charm so much in vogue. A brave man never hugs a pain he can get rid of: only sentimental young ladies do that. He knows it is a disease; some irregularity of the functions, so he sets himself as earnestly to cure that as he would a pain in his side or some defect in his respiratory organs. Yet truly to enjoy beautiful scenery, to taste it with loving, lingering lips, the heart must be clear, the mind healthy.

If we are to bring our burthens with us, and mount the Alps with them tightly strapped on our backs, we shall only get the result of being very tired; for while the body has been luxuriating in a green place, the heart has been brooding over the old sore, and we feel little else but its chafing.

It

This had been Vaughan's case; he did not find it so easy to get rid of his burthen. clung to his back, as the old man of the mountains did to Sinbad's; and many a sigh, that unconscious Greville attributed to the

mountain paths, came from a very different

source.

It was a gloomy afternoon in July, as the two friends came into the defile, at the head of which the village of Chamounix lies.

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"Now for Mont Blanc," exclaimed Greville. "Dacres, don't you feel excited?" "I feel hungry, if that is the article in question ?"

"Goth!"

"Can't help it, as the man said who was born without legs."

"What are you made of?"

"Albumen, phosphate of lime, and a few other articles. That is the last new kick I believe."

"Don't be a fool," said Greville, laughing, "I mean what makes you so insensible?"

“Habit perhaps, and I have been so dieted on mountains of late, that I loathe the fare. I am ready to exclaim with the Frenchman"Four les montagnes, je les déteste !”

"A pretty fellow you to come to Switzer

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