n has wrought a change in her behalf, permitted to eat
people, even her own sex, at the feasts of the men; the dainty enjoyed
by the men being considered too good to be wasted on women. Is anything
wanting to this picture of the degradation of woman? By a refinement of
cruelty she receives no benefit whatever from the missionaries who are
sent out by--what to her must seem a new name for Tantalus--the American
Board.

I suppose the Young Lady expressed a nearly universal feeling in her
regret at the breaking up of the winter-fireside company. Society needs
a certain seclusion and the sense of security. Spring opens the doors
and the windows, and the noise and unrest of the world are let in. Even
a winter thaw begets a desire to travel, and summer brings longings
innumerable, and disturbs the most tranquil souls. Nature is, in fact, a
suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions
of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven. The summer in
these latitudes is a campaign of sentiment and a season, for the most
part, of restlessness and discontent. We grow now in hot-houses roses
which, in form and color, are magnificent, and appear to be full of
passion; yet one simple June rose of the open air has for the Young
Lady, I doubt not, more sentiment and suggestion of love than a
conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion, leavened as
it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which
are so often like the peach-blossom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying by
reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more
limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse
by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if
some spell had been broken by the transition of her life from in-doors
to out-doors. Her secret, if secret she has, which I do not at all know,
is shared by the birds and the new leaves and the blossoms on the fruit
trees. If we lived elsewhere, in that zone where the poets pretend
always to dwell, we might be content, perhaps I should say drugged, by
the sweet influences of an unchanging summer; but not living elsewhere,
we can understand why the Young Lady probably now looks forward to the
hearthstone as the most assured center of enduring attachment.

If it should ever become the sad duty of this biographer to write of
disappointed love, I am sure he would not have any sensational story to
tell o