RISEN BY PERSEVERANCE. 



means of making new and comfortable settlements. I was 

 suffered to sleep till breakfast time, when I found a table, the 

 like of which I have since seen so many times in the United 

 States, loaded with good things. The master and the mistress 

 of the house, aged about fifty, were like what an English farmer 

 and his wife were half a century ago. There were two sons, 

 tall and stout, who appeared to have come in from work, and 

 the youngest of whom was about my age, then twenty-three. 

 But there was another member of the family, aged nineteen, 

 who (dressed according to the neat and simple fashion of 

 New England, whence she had come with her parents five or 

 six years before) had her long light-brown hair twisted nicely 

 up, and fastened on the top of her head, in which head were a 

 pair of lively blue eyes, associated with features of which that 

 softness and that sweetness so characteristic of American girls 

 were the predominant expressions, the whole being set off by a 

 complexion indicative of glowing health, and forming — figure, 

 movements, and all taken together — an assemblage of beauties 

 far surpassing any that I had ever seen but once in my life. 

 That once was, too, two years agone ; and, in such a case and 

 at such an age, two years, two whole years, is a long, long 

 while ! It was a space as long as the eleventh part of my then 

 life ! Here was the present against the absent ; here was the 

 power of the eyes pitted against that of the memory ; here 

 were all the senses up in arms to subdue the influ- 

 ence of the thoughts ; here was vanity, here was passion, 

 here was the spot of all spots m the world, and here 

 were also the life, and the manners, and the habits, and 

 the pursuits that I delighted in ; here was everything 

 that imagination can conceive — united in a conspiracy 

 against the poor little brunette in England ! What, then, 



