The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844

This lady, as we have intimated, possessed a large share of that generous spirit so common in her sex, which enabled her to sustain herself amid the evils which oppressed her. And nobly did the mother strive to shield from want and ignorance the little orphan, now her only care. Her own education enabled her in some measure to supply the place of teachers, which she was unable to employ. And never was maternal care better rewarded than by the improvement of the gentle being under her charge. But in this blessed employment the poor mother was interrupted. While health continued, she had been enabled by the most unremitted exertion to prevent the approach of absolute want, slight indeed as were her earnings. (The modern improvements in machinery having destroyed domestic manufacture, properly so called, and left but little for the female to earn who is not attending its motions in the noisy factory.) But illness had intervened, and diminished even that small resource; and it was apparent to all that the want of suitable food assisted in blanching still more the fair face of the poor child. Maternal love had conquered the honest pride of the poor mother so far as to constrain her to accept the slight and uncertain donations of her neighbors. But this assistance, scanty as it was, could not continue. The tax-paying husbands of the benevolent ladies who furnished it, complained that the poor-rates were heavy, and that they had already helped to pay for a house of refuge for the poor and the destitute, could not, in addition to this, support them out of it.

She was told it was her duty to place her daughter in some family to be brought up as a servant. In vain did she assert her ability to maintain herself and child when health should return. Her advisers could little sympathize with her feelings, and reproached her with pride. And she was now harassed with the fear that her delicate and cultivated little girl would be torn from her, and made a factory slave or household drudge; for such power had the laws given to the rulers of the town. But this fear, miserable as it was, was now overpowered by another. The suggestion had reached the ear of the unhappy woman that she and her child would be conveyed to the house of the town’s poor, the place we have attempted to describe. God grant that no fair reader of this homely but too true story should ever feel the misery which this fear inflicted on the mind of this friendless mother! Oh, that true Charity had been present in the person of her best representative on earth, a sensible, affectionate and liberal-minded woman, to minister to the wants, to soothe the mind of her unhappy sister-woman, and cheer her exertions for self-support! None such appeared, and the heart of the poor woman sank within her. Her exertions were paralyzed; for struggle as she might to avoid it, the alms-house, with its debased and debasing society, was ever before her eyes as her ultimate destiny. It was in vain that she endeavored to prepare her mind for this result. She could endure any degree of privation, but not degradation and infamy.

Time wore on, without any renewed hints of interference, and she began to hope that she was forgotten. Delusive hope! It was felt as a disgrace that she should suffer, when the law had provided a remedy, and they had paid for it. And it was therefore decreed by the magnates of the town that she must be removed, and the day had arrived (with which we commenced our narrative,) on which the paupers were to be disposed of for the coming year. Deacon S– was the person deputed by his colleagues, as we have mentioned, to convey Mrs. Selden and her daughter to the alms-house.

However prepared we may suppose ourselves to meet misfortune, the moment of its arrival takes us by surprise. We will not attempt to picture the utter desolation of mind and the despair which filled her heart, when this man arrived at her door, to convey herself, and oh! far worse, her innocent and intelligent child, to that scene of vice and debasement. Although her dislike to the measure was known, yet from her quiet and reserved manners, little opposition was anticipated. The evils of life had accumulated upon her in a regular gradation, and she had been enabled to bear their weight, up to this point, with outward composure; looking forward to, but yet hoping this last cup of bitterness would never be presented; or if presented, that some means might be found to avert it. But the dreadful crisis had arrived. Had the whole board of authority been present, I should be glad to believe, for the honor of humanity, that they would have been moved to relent, as they would not have been able to shift the responsibility from one to the other, as is the wont of such bodies when the members act separately.

When the poor woman had so far recovered from the first shock as to be enabled to articulate, she pleaded her ability to maintain herself without assistance, and her choice rather to starve than be removed. She appealed to him as the father of a daughter, and painted the ruin which would fall upon her own, exposed to the corruption and example of the place to which he was taking her. She appealed to him as a Christian, and reminded him that they had sat together before the sacred desk, and partaken of the symbols of the body and blood of the Son of Him who was in a peculiar manner the father of the widow and orphan. But her auditor was destitute of the imagination which enables the possessor to enter into the feelings of another; and these affecting appeals fell dead upon his worldly and unsympathizing nature. The man even extended his hand to urge her forward to the conveyance provided! At that moment, when all hope was dead within her, and the worst that could happen in her opinion had arrived, a change came over the unhappy woman. She suffered herself unresistingly to be led forward to her doom. The fine chords of the mind and heart, lately so intensely strung, had parted; her countenance relaxed, and her features settled down into a dead, unmeaning apathy; never again, during the short remainder of her life, to be animated by one gleam of the feelings which had so lately illumined but to destroy.

My kind, my indulgent mother! Her generous heart needed not the eloquence of my youthful feelings to induce her to rescue the poor orphan, and to cherish her as her own child. And never was kindness more richly–

I had proceeded thus far in writing this narrative, when I discovered that I was overlooked; and a gentle voice over my shoulder said: ‘You should not praise your own wife; it is the same as if you should praise yourself!’

E. B.

APOSTROPHE TO HEALTH

 
Hygeia! most blest of the powers
That tenant the mansions divine,
May I pass in thy presence the hours
That remain, ere in death I recline!
 
 
Dwell with me, benevolent charm!
Without the attendance of health
Not the smiles of affection can warm,
And dull are the splendors of wealth.
 
 
The pageant of empire is stale
That lifts men like gods o’er their race,
And the heart’s thrilling impulses fail
When Love beckons on to the chase.
 
 
Whate’er in itself joy can give,
Or that springs from sweet respite of pain,
That mortals or gods can receive,
Blest Hygeia! is found in thy train!
 
 
Thy smile kindles up the fresh spring,
The glad, verdant bloom of the soul;
Thee absent, our pleasures take wing,
And Sorrow usurps her control.
 

ISABEL

 
Hush! her face is chill,
And the summer blossom.
Motionless and still,
Lieth on her bosom.
On her shroud so white,
Like snow in winter weather,
Her marble hands unite,
Quietly together.
 
 
How like sleep the spell
On her lids that falleth!
Wake, sweet Isabel!
Lo! the morning calleth.
How like Sleep!—’tis Death!
Sleep’s own gentle brother;
Heaven holds her breath—
She is with her mother!
 

ONE READING FROM TWO POETS

 
——My imagination
Carries no favor in it but Bertram’s.
I am undone; there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away.
 

Shakspeare.

 
Should God create another Eve and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart.
 

Milton.

I have this evening, while seated in my lonely chamber, ventured—not, I hope, with profane hands—to draw one inappreciable gem from out of the carcanet of each of the two unrivalled masters of the poetry of our language. I was curious to see the effect to be produced by a close juxtaposition of these two exquisite specimens of the soul’s light; of the revealment of its original genius; of the intense brilliancy of its Truth, falling as it does in one ray upon two objects so diverse in their character as the virgin love of the retired and comparatively humble but devoted Helena, and the married constancy of the Father of our race.

The effect reminds me of an échappée de lumière that I once beheld in the gallery of the Vatican, when a sudden emergence of light brightened with the same gleam the calm face of the Virgin of the clouds, (called di Foligno,) and at the same instant illuminated the whole principal figure in the Transfiguration of Raffaelle; floating as it does, and tending almost with a movement upward, in the air of ‘the high mountain’ where the miracle took place–as these two grand paintings then stood, side by side, in the solemn, in the holy quiet of that lofty and sequestered apartment. O moment! never to be forgotten, never to be obscured by any lapse of after time!

And thus, although in a less palpable world, do these two passages of immortal verse, wearing each its beam of golden light, stand in their effulgence before the sympathies of the observer alive to the charms and influences of moral beauty! Surely no other poet has the world produced comparable to Shakspeare for the revelation of the love of the yet unwedded girl; and who is there to be named with Milton, in the tenderness and truth with which he has touched upon conjugal relationship; and that necessity, that inappeasable requirement of intercommunion that accompanies, as its immediate consequence, the sacrament of the nuptial rite where there is destined to exist the real, the progressive, the indissoluble intermarriage of soul with soul!

How effectually and with what truth does the dramatic Bard raise the veil and exhibit to us the imagination of this retired girl, bred up in all the deep earnestness of mind that a country life and comparative seclusion could induce, dwelling and brooding over the form of one individual brought into intimate association with her, ‘seeing him every hour’ where she had little else to interest her, nor any thing to contemplate, but, as she says,

 
‘sit and draw
His archéd brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart’s table; heart too capable
Of every trick and line of his sweet favour.
 
 
·····
 
 
——it hurts not him
That he is loved of me: I follow him not
With any token of presumptuous suit.
I know I love in vain, strive against hope,
Yet, in this captious and intenible sieve,
I still pour in the waters of my love
And lack not to love still.’
 

Behold her as she sits, the beautiful creation!—delighting to magnify the qualities of the idol of her affections and to depreciate herself in the comparison; overlooking, perhaps incapable of once imagining the thought of his harsh and selfish and impracticable nature, and constantly endowing him with all the fresher breathings of her spiritual existence—like the Rainbow of the Waterfall, that clothes, with its own celestial dyes, the dark and shapeless mass of Rock upon whose bosom it appears to dwell! faltering, trembling, quivering, fading, disappearing; returning, resting;—glowing, yet never dazzling; liquid, yet sustained!

 
‘It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And seek to wed it, he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love!
 

This is the way in which these precious irradiations of joy beam and hover over man; startled and frightened often out of the presence even of his image while they thus adorn and decorate him; and then they love him for what they fondly dream to be the halo of his proper spirit; for the light and tenderness, the purity, the gentleness, the refinement and grace, that have their life and element and colour, only in the deep yet overflowing heart of Woman in her Love!

But then comes Wedlock; and often, with wedlock, comes marriage; or succeeds it; the marriage that God bestowed on man in Eve, when, according to that scriptural and exquisite conception, they twain become one. When the Rock shall as by a miracle receive into all its crevices, interstices, and pores, the beautiful existence that has played upon it! When the soul of man opens at every noble passion in succession and at every pulse, to embrace, imbibe, absorb, receive, possess, acquire, the being that we call Woman! finds her in every former want, or present wish, or bright, or unfrequented passage of the soul; now all occupied, all satisfied by her; fancies thoughts to be his thoughts which are her thoughts; and blesses himself, when he discovers it, that imaginations in themselves so sweet, should in some visit of her delicate spirit have been breathed into his Essence from a source so pure! is near her, when distant; is present with her, when absent; converses with her, without words; gazes upon her, without sight; listens to her, without sound; watches her, without motion; and has not yet lost her balmy presence when Death shall long have removed forever that precious image from his corporal sense. This is Marriage.

Out of this state descends that profound expression of the soul in Milton, (God make us thankful for him!) when he intends the verb that he escapes in the passage that adorns my Essay, should be supplied by a pulsation in the breast of Eve:

 
‘yet loss of thee
Would never—from my heart.’
 

Would never?—would never be torn, out-rooted, obliterated, banished, extinguished, forgotten, diminished, obscured, from his heart. The throb of her spirit is to supply the word, or mould the thought, and vivify the pause so as to satisfy her full affection to its utmost contentment and desire. This is marriage. This is attainment to that state of more perfect existence which terrestrial life procures for the soul of man, never thenceforth in all its future changes to be lost. The incorporeal mingling, the mystical union of two varied emanations of life; as Light and Heat intermarry in their offset and passage from the sun; and Truth and Love from the breast of The Ineffable!

 
How can I live without thee! how forego
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly join’d
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart: no, no, I feel
The link of nature draw me.
Bone of my bone thou art and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
 

And shall the passage of one such soul across the mere brook of Death dissolve affiances so deep, so latent, and so pure as this? This Life of Life, is it to be so suddenly quenched in man, and man himself continue to exist? Shall the soul that lingers here still retaining its identity lose that which has chiefly formed for it a distinctive being? Or entering into a happier state of existence shall it be dispossessed of all that treasure of recollection and delight on which its joys and hopes have been so largely founded? These long remembrances of mutual beneficence and good, these intertwining and interwoven affections, and the unbounded and mingling love of their common offspring, shall these all perish and the soul itself yet be styled immortal? Or,—shall the first-gone spirit meet its arriving mate upon the border of that further shore, bless it with the radiant welcome of celestial companionship and guidance, and lead it on to higher virtue in a happier state, as it hath beamed upon it and in part educated it on Earth?–Doubt this not, my Heart! Doubt this not, my Soul!

John Waters.

WHERE IS THE SPIRIT-WORLD?

BY A NEW CONTRIBUTOR

 
Perhaps the World of Spirits
Is the invisible air,
And every soul inherits
Its endless portion there,
When mortal lays its mortal by,
And puts on immortality.
 
 
Then round us and above us
Unseen, the souls of those
That hate us and that love us
In motion or repose,
To plan and work our good or ill,
As when on earth, are busy still.
 
 
For Enmity surviveth
This transitory life;
Spirit with spirit striveth
In an unending strife;
All roots of evil planted now
Eternally shall live and grow.
 
 
So friendship ever liveth
Immortal as the soul,
And purer pleasure giveth
As longer ages roll;
And hope and joy and inward peace
Forever heighten and increase!
 
 
Our homes and dwelling-places,
The country of our birth,
The old familiar faces
Endeared to us on earth,
And every source and scene of joy
Our spirits’ senses shall employ.
 
 
So shall our true affections,
To earthly objects given,
Form intimate connections
Between our world and heaven;
And all our long existence move
In an unbroken stream of love.
 

THE TYRANNY OF AFFECTION

BY MRS. ENNSLO

Methinks those who preach up the dignity of human nature, and expatiate upon its original perfections, must look upon it through magic glasses: to some perceptions at least, it presents even in its best estate a picture of such abortive aims, such woful short-comings, such clouded brightness, that even in those better natures, where we feel sure that the sun of virtue does shine, the noxious vapors of human frailty, pride in all its various ramifications, selfishness under its many disguises, prejudice with its endless excuses, etc., etc., do so envelope it that we cannot hope to feel the warmth of its rays until some wholesome trial, some aptly-apportioned cross, clear away these paralyzing influences and force it into action.

What seems at the first glance freer from this dross than the love of man to man? the love of the creature for his fellow; the ordained test of his love to his Creator? What seems more preëminently pure than the affection of the parent for the child, who owes him not only life but the nurture which has maintained and elevated that life? Yet even here, even over this fair garden of peace, the trail of the serpent may be detected. The tyranny of deep affection is seen in every relation of life: we love a cherished object, it may be with every fibre of our heart, ay, even idolatrously; we would willingly spend and be spent to surround the beloved one with materials for enjoyment; but these materials must be of our selection; we would sacrifice ourselves to lead them to happiness, but we must point out the road to them; we will bear every thing, endure every thing, but the mortification of seeing them receive good at other hands than our own. Ah! there are some rare exceptions to this rule, but surely not more than enough to constitute it a rule.

Who that enjoyed the privilege of domestic intercourse with the venerable and venerated father of the lovely Lucy Lee; he the most beloved as well as respected inhabitant of the small town of –; she not only the prettiest but by far the most winning in her deportment of all the young female circle of the place, of whom she was beyond all question the ornament. Who that witnessed the fond pride with which the good old man gazed upon her, as she glided around him, ministering to his wants with that watchful ingenuity which characterizes woman’s affection; who that heard the tone of tenderness which marked even the most trifling word addressed to her; a tenderness that seemed as if it might by its deep pathos invoke every beneficent spirit to watch over her for good; his early morning greeting, always accompanied by an upward look, which proclaimed a daily aspiration of gratitude to the great Giver for the precious gift; the nightly benediction which ever seemed as if it might grow into a prayer for her welfare during the hours of darkness; who that witnessed all this—and they could not be seen together without many such hourly demonstrations of the father’s love for his child shining through his every word and action—but would have felt assured that this love fashioned his every plan, and marked his estimate of the things of life?

Ah! of a certainty, it must have been so; her happiness must have been safe in his keeping; and in truth, happiness had hitherto seemed hers by prescriptive right. But all lanes however long turn at last, and those most richly strewn with flowers are generally alas! by far the shortest. Eighteen summers had flown since that which saw the little Lucy installed sole possessor and sole solace of her bereaved father’s heart; sole pledge of a love which deeply rooted in a breast no longer subject to the changeful fancies of youth, (for he had more than attained the prime of middle-age when the original of the precious little miniature first enchained his affections,) never revived for any other, but spent itself in a doting fondness for this fair image of the lost one. Indeed it seemed that every throb came with a double import from his burdened heart; the parent’s fondness ever mingling a tribute to the memory of her whose life had been the price of the costly gift.

It is not always that the devotion of a parent is so entirely appreciated as in this case; all Mr. Lee’s efforts to promote his daughter’s happiness were crowned with entire success, and until the period mentioned above, no one had ever detected on her lovely brow the semblance of a cloud. But the course of nature cannot be altered; the petted child will one day grow into the wilful woman; and however it may have been only a pleasant task to follow the windings of the childish fancy ingenious in its caprice; and only amusing to submit to the childish tyranny which pursues its own beau-ideal of sport with reckless pertinacity; there sometimes comes a change when the spoiled darling takes her first step upon the threshold of maturity; when, with all the fresh vigor of youth in her untutored will, she begins to assert her privilege, to cater for her own happiness, and fashion her future according to the visions of her own fancy. Then comes in the world with its many and diversified claims; claims so vigorously enforced, but from which it is the first impulse of the young heart to turn with loathing: it cannot bear to believe its happy independence of all such considerations at an end; it does not submit easily to these new trammels. Ah! how differently has passed the previous life! Something holy gathers round a child; it seems to move superior to the base claims of the world and its paltry rewards; and although often, it must be confessed, the young intellect is early impressed with the idea that its best efforts should be devoted to the insuring of worldly approbation, still the little one’s course of life is so distinct from the busy race to which we would train it, that we cannot if we would entirely chain down its thoughts; nay, we shrink before the pure innocence which cannot even understand our weakness; and often yield a tribute to its superior dignity by concealing our own care for such distinctions.

To those too who have seen much of life, and learnt to feel its hollowness, real childishness of thought and feeling is so refreshing, that they love rather to prolong the period than to shorten it. To Mr. Lee the little Lucy seemed so entirely perfect in her infantine simplicity and purity, that had he breathed a wish for the future, it would probably have been that she should always continue his little Lucy; he cared for no change, and as it appeared, perceived none in her. Time passed on however, and before he had become well aware that the little fairy whose tiny form must needs so short a while since clamber on his knee to stroke and pat his cheek, had now shot up into a tall girl, who could take his arm in a long walk, or canter beside him all the morning on her well trained pony, there came a change over the course of his quiet household little startling. Visitors began to throng the hall; not those staid personages who had hitherto been wont to gather round the warm hearth in winter, or the sheltered piazza in the hot days of summer, and with feet upreared on mantel-piece or bannister, discuss the affairs of state, and the price of crops; new editions of these respected individuals now appeared; nephews and sons came in their train; young friends, more perhaps than these gentlemen were before aware of possessing, sought an introduction at their hands, or came without any, on the plea perhaps of having met at a tea-party, or some such strong necessity for acquaintanceship with the fair Lucy; while the good Mr. Lee, often to his not very pleased surprise, found on awaking from his afternoon’s nap, that the book whose contents he had purposed should perform their daily office of inspiring his dreams had been laid aside, while the voice which had lulled him to sleep was now charming other and younger ears in merry though perhaps suppressed cadences. The variety in these visitors too grew somewhat annoying; new people came, and Mr. Lee liked not new people. He was a man of warm but very exclusive feelings; he loved but a few, and he liked no others: his prejudices were strong, and having lived a very secluded life, the routine of which presented no very decided obstacle to those prejudices, his estimate of men and things had not altered with the general course of the world around him. Liberal to an extreme in his dealings with men, his intercourse with them, except in matters of business, was confined to a very limited circle. Absolute in his requisitions from such as approached him as intimates, his friendship was given only to those who met his views in every respect; especially whose political opinions coincided with his own. Indeed this seemed to be with him the one grand test. Though never meddling in his own person with public life, he had such an abstract love for its intricacies that he could at all times warm into actual enthusiasm over a newspaper; a single paragraph from the pen one of his own way of thinking sufficing to kindle his feelings into a glow of patriotism, while a civil word of dissent would seem to chill his sympathies for his kind; strong disapprobation blinding his perceptions to any good possible in those differing from his established standard. Now it was not to be expected that the young Lucy’s circle would be modelled according to such restrictions; she loved her kind old father with the clinging fondness of an unweaned infant for its mother; but though again and again she would, to gratify him, toil through a whole pamphlet, its meaning as dark to her perceptions as the close and blurred print to his failing eyes, it may well be imagined that her girlish brain failed to receive any other impression from the contents than of their excessive tedium; certainly if she formed therefrom any opinion regarding his favorite party, it was most probably the not very flattering one that its members were all especially tiresome and prolix.

Either from this notion, or a contradiction natural to human nature, it so happened that among the rivals for the lovely Lucy’s smiles, none seemed to possess such power in riveting her attention as a certain young gentleman, who although not only the son of a leading man in the opposition, but holding himself a somewhat prominent place in the ranks of the condemned party, yet continued with a boldness much to be wondered at to engross the young lady’s time by frequent visits of most unfashionable length, in spite of Mr. Lee’s open vituperations of all the manœuvres of the said party. The undaunted aspirant turned a deaf ear however to this, taking every thing that was said in good part, until one day, when suddenly his patience seemed to give out.

News had just been received of the marriage of a former school-mate of Lucy’s, the daughter of an old esteemed comrade, orthodox in all his views, to an individual decidedly in the wrong on the one important point. First, how astonished, next how entirely shocked, was the good old gentleman! ‘What a falling off! to give his child to –! Pshaw! what would the world come to! Where were his principles? where his wisdom? where his honor?’ etc., etc. Lucy, frightened perhaps at her father’s vehemence, turned pale. Dr. Kent, the friend and physician of the family, who chanced to be present, endeavored to calm him, but with little success; and Mr. Lillburgh, unable as it seemed to join in condemning this ‘mis-alliance,’ left the house somewhat abruptly. Soon after this, however, an opportune influx of papers and pamphlets caused a salutary diversion in Mr. Lee’s irritated feelings; and as Lucy’s most monopolizing visitor seemed quite to have disappeared, he could now enjoy his favorite luxury of drinking in, through the medium of the voice he loved so well, the words of wisdom he honored so highly.

Whether these tiresome lectures proved too burdensome for her young spirits, or some other cause operated to injure her health, did not appear; but just at this time, when Mr. Lee seemed to find his life especially comfortable and pleasant, his hitherto blooming daughter gradually began to droop; her spirits, formerly so even, were now constantly fluctuating: at times she would sit pale and distraite among a gay and laughing circle of her young associates, while at others, a ring at the bell, a step in the hall, would suffice to call the color to her cheek and kindle animation in her eye. It was this variation perhaps, together with certain animating plans of his own, which rendered her father insensible to her condition; for by a strange contradiction in the course of things, he seemed just at this time especially occupied with forming brilliant plans for her future. Fairly aware now of her being no longer a child, he would comment upon her dress, urge her to more ornament, and then with a knowing look speak of his anticipated pleasure in the society of two expected visitors, one staunch old veteran of the true faith, and his son, a worthy descendant, one who deserved the smiles of the fair for the brilliant speech he had made the last session. Poor Lucy at each reference to this subject would look more and more uncomfortable; but her father, thinking that she might be perhaps a little wayward; while he grew daily more enamoured of his plan, redoubled his tenderness, seeking to study her whims in every other respect. It is cruel to loose every bond but that which galls most sorely, to pluck away every thorn but that which pricks most sharply: all the perceptions gather to that point, and the suffering is in consequence tenfold more acute. Such were Lucy’s sensations, though she was perhaps scarcely conscious of them herself; while at every demonstration of her father’s tenderness, the feelings which she knew to be rebels to his dearest wishes would seem to spring up and accuse her of ingratitude. This struggle could not last; at length the fond father became suddenly aware that some strange blight had fallen upon his darling, and his whole soul was convulsed at the thought that evil might possibly threaten her; he felt ready to send a proclamation through the world to summon all its skill to spend itself for her restoration. Upon second thoughts he made up his mind that there was but one man in the world to whom he would confide the precious trust; yes, he was fully assured that in the brain of Dr. Kent, the only lineal descendant of Esculapius, were to be found all the best resources of the art of healing; he must always and on all occasions, be more right than any one else. Why? But why ask why, when he had formed this opinion ever since Dr. Kent first assumed the M. D., and had always held it firmly. Dr. Kent was summoned and soon appeared; the startled girl, sorely against her will, was called into the room; all the usual ceremony gone through; the pulse tested, the tongue examined, etc., and then suffered to slip out of the room. Mr. Lee listened with a beating heart for the doctor’s decision: this last did not deny that the young lady’s appearance was strangely altered since he had last seen her, which indeed was not since the evening above alluded to, of Mr. Lee’s violent irritation against his old friend. But the cause; the next thing for the doctor to do was to discover the cause. Now Dr. Kent, although some people did say that he was no student, had a considerable portion of what is called mother-wit; and if he did not possess the stores of learning which might have been amassed by poring over his books, he was at least without the abstraction which much scientific research is thought to occasion; he looked around him with a shrewd eye, and simply by putting two and two together, often made very successful calculations. He hesitated, reflected and recollected; ‘perhaps she wanted excitement,’ he said; ‘perhaps there was too little variety in her life for one so young.’ Mr. Lee assured him that she had always appeared very indifferent to society; that until very lately she had always seemed as happy as the day was long, and to desire no other company than that of the visitors who dropped in upon them occasionally.