itecraft would spread
for him. The tears, however, which she shed abundantly, in due time
relieved her, and in the course of an hour or two she was able to appear
as usual in the family.

The reader may perceive that her father, though of an abrupt and cynical
temper, was not a man naturally of a bad or unfeeling heart. Whatever
mood of temper chanced to be uppermost influenced him for the time; and
indeed it might be said that one half of his feelings were usually in a
state of conflict with the other. In matters of business he was the very
soul of integrity and honor, but in his views of public affairs he
was uncertain and inconsistent; and of course his whole life, as a
magistrate and public man, was a perpetual series of contradictions. The
consequence of all this was, that he possessed but small influence,
as arising from his personal character; but not so from his immense
property, as well as from the fact that he was father to the wealthiest
and most beautiful heiress in the province, or perhaps, so far as beauty
was concerned, in the kingdom itself.

At length the day mentioned for the dinner arrived, and, at the
appointed hour, so also did the guests. There were some ladies asked to
keep Helen in countenance, but we need scarcely say, that as the list of
them was made out by her thoughtless father, he paid, in the selection
of some of them, very little attention to her feelings. There was the
sheriff, Mr. Oxley, and his lady--the latter a compound in whom it was
difficult to determine whether pride, vulgarity, or obesity prevailed.
Where the sheriff had made his capture of her was never properly known,
as neither of them belonged originally to that neighborhood in which he
had, several years ago, purchased large property. It was said he had got
her in London; and nothing was more certain than that she issued forth
the English language clothed in an inveterate cockney accent. She was a
high moralist, and a merciless castigator of all females who manifested,
or who were supposed to manifest, even a tendency to walk out of the
line of her own peculiar theory on female conduct. Her weight might be
about eighteen stone, exclusive of an additional stone of gold chains
and bracelets, in which she moved like a walking gibbet, only with the
felon in it; and to crown all, she wore on her mountainous bosom a cameo
nearly the size of a frying-pan. Sir Jenkins Joram, who took her down to
dinner, declared, on feeling the si