me a sort of friend and confidant. She teased me with a
thousand vapid complaints about school-quarrels and household economy:
the cookery was not to her taste; the people about her, teachers and
pupils, she held to be despicable, because they were foreigners. I bore
with her abuse of the Friday's salt fish and hard eggs--with her
invective against the soup, the bread, the coffee--with some patience
for a time; but at last, wearied by iteration, I turned crusty, and put
her to rights: a thing I ought to have done in the very beginning, for
a salutary setting down always agreed with her.

Much longer had I to endure her demands on me in the way of work. Her
wardrobe, so far as concerned articles of external wear, was well and
elegantly supplied; but there were other habiliments not so carefully
provided: what she had, needed frequent repair. She hated
needle-drudgery herself, and she would bring her hose, &c. to me in
heaps, to be mended. A compliance of some weeks threatening to result
in the establishment of an intolerable bore--I at last distinctly told
her she must make up her mind to mend her own garments. She cried on
receiving this information, and accused me of having ceased to be her
friend; but I held by my decision, and let the hysterics pass as they
could.

Notwithstanding these foibles, and various others needless to
mention--but by no means of a refined or elevating character--how
pretty she was! How charming she looked, when she came down on a sunny
Sunday morning, well-dressed and well-humoured, robed in pale lilac
silk, and with her fair long curls reposing on her white shoulders.
Sunday was a holiday which she always passed with friends resident in
town; and amongst these friends she speedily gave me to understand was
one who would fain become something more. By glimpses and hints it was
shown me, and by the general buoyancy of her look and manner it was ere
long proved, that ardent admiration--perhaps genuine love--was at her
command. She called her suitor "Isidore:" this, however, she intimated
was not his real name, but one by which it pleased her to baptize
him--his own, she hinted, not being "very pretty." Once, when she had
been bragging about the vehemence of "Isidore's" attachment, I asked if
she loved him in return.

"Comme cela," said she: "he is handsome, and he loves me to
distraction, so that I am well amused. Ca suffit."

Finding that she carried the thing on longer than, from her ver