hard work that was for all, but most for the sister, who was overworked, underfed, and yet regarded as a favoured dependent. An elder sister years before had lived with Mrs. Hale, but being well-educated and highspirited she took flight to India, meaning to be a governess, or something of that kind; but the disgrace, as Dr. Hale called it, of such a step was prevented by her marrying a poor gentleman in the civil service there. Mean

while the younger sister had grown up in bondage, and had no means, it seemed, of escape. She was flimsily taught, as girls mostly were then; and so a genteel drudge she was, and knew pretty well the meaning of the word torture.

'But imagine the sensation that was caused when old Sir John Polixphene looked in the face of this poor thing, and saw that it was very fair amid its pensiveness, and that her being grown out of her vamped-up frock was by no means a way to hide the graces of her form. But I'm not going to dwell on this ogreish love. The young girl shrank from him as a pure nature, revolted by hoary imbecility and folly, would and should. But the family, when they saw this monstrous infatuation of the old man's, were in ecstacies. Their little fag was instantly elevated into a person of consequence in the household, and "Don't tease darling Aunty so" was the new and strange command to the children, who had always considered "Little Aunty" as their lawful property, as much as the nursery kitten that they pulled and pinched-only Aunty had no talons.

Shame, perhaps, kept Mrs. Hale from any explanation with her sister. She thought that the prospect of leaving a scene of toil, having a rich home, and being called " My lady," would overcome any natural repugnance the young girl might have to the man who could offer these advantages. So there came a day when, by the connivance of the doctor and his wife, Sir John found himself alone with the object of his monstrous passion. She had so carefully avoided him, that he eagerly seized the opportunity, and made his offer to the shocked and startled girl. Calmly and most decidedly she refused him, to the amazement of the suitor, who was by no means ignorant of the worldly value of his social status, and attriVOL. 1.-No. 3.

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buted the failure he had before met with to the fact of the lady having a fortune of her own. 66 Had she been

In

poor," he argued, "she would have given a very different reply." But here was an incomprehensible young girl, the bond-slave in a family of tyrants young and old, who refused to escape to rank and freedom, and who kept saying nervously-"Sir! respect for you, as well as myself, prevents my for an instant listening to your offer." an evil moment the infatuated old sinner alluded to her dependence, and then the young girl's timidity vanished, and she asked him-"Is it because I am poor, and, alas! friendless, that you have made this proposal? Do you force me to consider it not a folly, but an insult?" He saw in a moment, ladies, that it was no pretty, mealymouthed "No," that meant-" Yes," such as conventionalism, I am told, requires from female lips. He, Sir John Polixphene, with his houses and lands, his gifts and graces, was refused by this poor dependent, who dared to stigmatise the marriage he proposed as "a violation of the sanctities of nature." In a terrible rage-for nothing is so provoking as truth-the aged suitor hobbled away.

If there was rage on his part, who shall describe the tempest that burst on the poor girl? Dr. Hale and his wife, disappointed, mortified beyond endurance, sent forth bitter, arrowy words that wounded their victim at. every pore. Ah, ladies! the martyrdom of St. Sebastian is but a type of what society often inflicts. In vain the poor girl pleaded, "she could not love the man, and that marriage without love was deadly sin." They affected to be horrified at such sentiments-bold, unfeminine, immoral, indecent; but the long and short of it was, Dr. Hale would maintain such a rebellious, ungrateful creature 110 longer.

Roused by the very imminence of her destitution, the young girl said, "Let me try to get my living; I want to be a burden to no one."

with her altogether, the Hales dismissed her from their house to the dwelling of an old servant, who lived in a village some miles distant; and hoped that they might propitiate Sir John, and bring down the spirit of their relative: but they signally failed, for, in the quiet of the poor cottage, the persecuted girl recruited both mind and body. She took a calm view of her position; and feeling herself released from her sister's care by being sent from her dwelling, she resolved, as the old story-books say, to go forth and seek her fortune. She was a good needlewoman, and though then, as now, there were plenty of distressed seamstresses, still she resolved to try her skill; and hearing that the old servant with whom she was now living had a sister in Plymouth who kept an outfitting shop, she wrote to her, and asked to be allowed to make a trial as an assistant in her business. The plan was soon arranged; and just as Dr. and Mrs. Hale were intending to command her return (for she was sorely missed in their household), she had established herself at a little worktable in a garret under the friendly roof of her new acquaintance at Plymouth.

'It was a hard struggle for life for many a weary month; but she had tasted the sweets of the crust earned by honest, independent toil, and she persevered. One letter passed on each side between her and her relatives-a peremptory order to return, or to consider herself no longer a relation of theirs. A quiet refusal to comply with the first request, and a hope that she should never be unworthy of her name, comprised the whole correspondence. The Hales caused it to be believed in Exeter that their sister had gone to reside with a relative at a distance, and she was no longer spoken of among them. Henceforth they were dead to each other.

removed, a change awaited her that developed her unselfish character, and led to better days. She had scarcely been settled in her lodgings three weeks, when an epidemic disorder broke out in the town, and carried sickness and death into many dwellings. Its progress was so rapid and fatal, that all who could left the place panic-stricken. Opposite to the young seamstress's lodging was the handsome shop of the principal bookseller and printer of the town. A father and son were the proprietors of the business; and the family, besides these, consisted of the son's wife and child, a young sister, two apprentices, and a servant. Into this abode the fever entered with fearful power: the servant and eldest apprentice died two days after the first attack; and then the other apprentice ran away; and the neighbours, in their dread, refused to enter the dwelling where both the partners in the business, father and son, were seized with the malady in its most malignant form. From her window the lonely needlewoman watched the pallid, delicate wife waiting on her husband and fatherin-law, and saw that the child and the shop were left to the young sister Bertha, a girl of some fourteen years of age. Her resolution was taken to go over and offer assistance. When she named her determination to her landlady, she was told she must not return to those lodgings if she went to the fever-stricken house. However, she went, and was hailed as an angel of light by the poor worn-out young wife. A wonderful energy supported the visitor to that house of affliction. She it was who cut off all intercourse between the shop and the house, and restricted Bertha and the child to the front premises day and night. She it was who watched and waited on the sufferers, and on the dismal night that deprived the poor wife both of husband and father-in-law, she was the helper and the comforter, the nurse and friend.

• With these victims the fever departed; but scarcely had the grave closed over them when the child, who had been well through all the troubles, sickened and died of some infantine disease; and the poor widow, heartbroken at her sorrows, had but little strength for an expected trial that was to give a fatherless infant to her arms. In two months' time a new life came

into that house of death; and through all these varied scenes of calamity, the young seamstress was a ministering angel, ever active, ready, cheerful. Her health returned as these demands were made on her energies. When not in the sick-room, she studied the details of the business; and the neighbours, when their fright was over, feeling ashamed of their desertion of the widow in her time of need, now vied with each other in promoting the business which, at first, had been threatened with ruin. The widow, as soon as she partially recovered, instructed her willing helper, who, aided by the young sister, contrived to take all severe toil from the bereaved; and if health and comfort could have come to the widow, the house of sorrow would have lost its gloom. But Mrs. Festonleigh never rallied. The second summer after the death of her husband she also departed, leaving her little girl Alice, the posthumous child, her sister Bertha, and the business in trust for them, to the friend who had come to her in her hour of need. So you see our seamstress had now her hands full-a family and a shop bequeathed to her. She was equal to it. She farmed off the printing business, taking a moderate profit from it, but not parting with it; and, having both taste and judgment, so increased the book and library department, that soon it was the best shop in the town. She fulfilled her trust; gave Alice a good education; and offered, when she came of age, to resign the business to her. But Alice had other prospects. She became the wife of the captain of a merchant ship, and would only take a very moderate dower from one whom she rightly regarded as a mother. Bertha, delicate from childhood, had died years before. And so there was no impediment to the prosperity of the subject of my narrative. Simple in her mode of living, regular in her business pursuits, she grew gradually but surely rich. All the investments of her savings were wisely made; but money, for its own sake, she did not value. There was not a charitable institution in the town, or at length in the county, that she did not benefit; and it came to pass that her Exeter relations found her out. They were somewhat scandalised at having a shopkeeping sister; but as she manifested no intention of visiting them,

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Why, I have not so long been here, you know, and when I came from Rome, I purposed going down to the west; and then I heard from one of the young Hales that his aunt Fanny had retired from business, and was travelling for a time; and I find she took a young girl, who had been a schoolfellow of her ward Alice, with her to Germany --the eldest sister of the Tiffanys-and that began the friendship with them; and so for a time she has made her abode here, and tested the courtesy and hospitality of our venerable city.'

'Dear, goodness! It's very strange, I must say, for a gentleman's daughter to go into trade.'

Oh! as to that, ladies, spare your wonder; some of our best nobility have had no higher origin. Here's a book,' he added, tapping a volume, with Mudie's label, that lay on the table, which says Cornwallis and Coventry

the

the Earls of Radnor, Essex, Dartmouth, Craven, Harwich, Tankerville, Pomfret, Darnley, Cowper, and Romney, are respectively descended from a city merchant, a London mercer, a silk manufacturer, a city alderman, a member of the Skinners' Company, a merchant tailor, a mercer, a Calais merchant; and good London citizens were the ancestors of the other noble families;* and very good ancestors too, better, to my mind, than the pretty Mistress Nelly, or the crafty Duchess of Portsmouth, or the imperious Castlemaine, and other ill-omened birds of that feather.'

'Well, major, but what became of the old lover with whom your story commenced?' said Mary Fitzflam.

'Oh! he went home and married his housemaid, a buxom lass of twenty, and a pretty piece of business he made of it.'

'But, my dear major,' interposed Miss Penelope Fitzflam, her eyes kindling with triumph, according to your theory, in thus acting he was only showing his superiority to "caste prejudices."

6

Pardon me, Miss Pen. I'm no leveller, and I have no sympathy with all the wild talk about equality that some people delight in.

This miserable old man might have found companionship for his declining years among his many relatives, or he might have chosen suitably as to age and education, and married well and wisely. But early youth naturally shrank from him; and when he chose a wife without education or principle, I say he disgraced his family and stained his name. You ladies often quote Scripture; I do not. I abstain reverently from doing that which you as reverently, perhaps, feel constrained to do. But there's a pithy little sentence of four words -"Be not unequally yoked "--which I suppose is a divine command, is it not? Now youth and age, refinement and rudeness, education and ignorance, these are inequalitiesthey are not contrasts merely. Contrasts may harmonise, as discords in music. I have seen a few such marriages in my time, though hardly so outrageous as old Sir John Polixphene's, and they all turned out much the same. A low woman, unable to comprehend

* See The History and Antiquities of North Allerton, in the county of York,' by C. T. Davidson Ingledew, Esq. See also 'Athenæum,' August 14th, p. 195.

her position, intent on showing off the finery, for which she has sold herself, among her former companions-feeling a loathing and impatience towards the man who has bought her-what but misery and shame can, or ought to come, from such nuptials? I believe Sir John's lady was true to her early training and pursuits, and flourished her besom famously after she ceased to be accredited housemaid. None dared dispute her rule, least of all her husband. She embittered his life, shortened his days, spent his money, and ended by marrying an old flame-the coachman-who, it was said-I hope with truth-paid off Sir John's debts. No, no, ladies; to honour worth wherever it is found, to abjure the paltry pride whose root is in the charnelhouse of antiquity, and to recognise the

truth

"The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man's the gowd for a' that" that would do good in many a little pent-up circle-where there can be no growth for the virtues hemmed in by barriers that shut out both the light of reason and the air of freedom.'

The old major's eyes flashed as he spoke; and Mary Fitzflam-who was better than her name-shook his hand as he ceased, and said, 'Thank you, sir, for your narrative and your comments. I, for one, shall not forget your words. I hope the time may soon come when these caste prejudices among us may pass away, and Christian principles be as manifest in our social institutions as they are vaunted in our professions.'

Whether Miss Mary's hopes are yet realised in C, the writer can scarcely say, but a better state of things prevails; and when a good action is done, the doer of it is not snubbed if he or she happen to belong to the class of workers; and the idlers are less assured of their Poor

gentility than they once were. Miss Megrim ventures to introduce into her schoolroom now and then a particularly well-behaved daughter of the trading class, and is evidently not so much in awe of aristocratic peeping and prying, and thinks less dolefully of the almshouse that seems fading rather than looming in the distance.

Even in a cathedral city, ventilation of opinion is possible in this age of marvels.