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Excerpt from The Fortunes of the Falconars, Vol. 1 of 3 Could any one of the joyous actors in that scene of festivity have at that moment lifted up the curtain which shrouds futurity from our mortal ken, and beheld through the vista of one and twenty years, the transactions of another and a coming evening, about the same season of the year, with what a shock of awful conviction that all is vanity, would the dark contrast have struck upon his heart! And yet, he would have seen no more than the common event which must come to all; the contrast would have been no greater than that which most periods, long sepa rated by time, present to each other, when viewed by the mind in close juxtaposition, without re ference to the intervening events - the minute and imperceptible degrees of shading by which joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, life and death, have been gradually woven into the chain of existence. It is this shading - this slow unfolding of the chain - which causes us to feel so little wonder, whilst we meditate on its strangely differing links. Leave some of the connecting ones out of sight, and look here upon this picture, and on this, of past periods, and the contrast is indeed wonderful - frequently awful. So it would have been to those who, perceiving nothing of what connected the two events, could have cast their eyes onward from the day of Douglas Falconar's wedding, to that of his funeral. On that day, then, in the end of the same month, September, 1822, a setting sun was sink ing, as bright and calm as when it lighted these happy young hearts on the road to their future home. A more enduring home had opened to receive the bridegroom of that former evening; and the sod of his ancient family burial-place had, ere the last rays fell upon the trees which bent above it, been laid down upon his breast. The funeral train had long been dispersed - the widow and her daughters were weeping alone and the eldest son of Douglas Falconar, a youth of twenty, r