versation, toned by the ideas of
pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane
and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in
the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated,
feverish air of perverse influences that tainted her gilded home.

Sixteen years of sorrow and repentance had passed over Madeleine,
and found her, at the commencement of our narrative, the victim of
consumption and internal anguish, the more keen because the more secret.
The outward world believed her happy; many silly maidens, in moments
of vanity, deemed they could have gained heaven if they were possessed
of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were
the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning
of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the
blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the
flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever
flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of
regret over the ill-fated Madeleine, whose discolored eye and attenuated
form, whose pallid cheek, furrowed by incessant tears, told the wreck
of a beautiful girl sinking to an early tomb.

Her children--three in number--cause her deepest anxiety; they are the
heroes of our tale, and must at once be introduced to the reader.

Chapter IV.

A Youth Trained in the Way He Should Walk.

To-morrow--
'Tis a period nowhere to be found
In all the hoary registers of time,
Unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.
Wisdom disdains the word, nor holds society
With those who own it.
'Tis Fancy's child, and Folly is its father;
Wrought of such stuff as dreams are, and as baseless
As the fantastic visions of the evening.
--Coulton.

Like one of those rare and beautiful flowers found on the mountain-side
in fellowship with plants of inferior beauty, the heir of the
Cassier family is a strange exception of heroic virtue in the midst
of a school of seduction. The saints were never exotics in their own
circle. Their early histories are filled with sad records confirming
the prophecy of our blessed Lord: "The world will hate you because
it loves not me."

The student of hagiology recalls with a sight the touching fate of
a Dympna who was the martyred victim of a father's impiety; of