ern productions,
composed the collection. It was a mine of treasure. Some marginal notes,
in Dryden's Fables, caught her attention: they were written with force
and taste; and, in one of the modern pamphlets, there was a fragment
left, containing various observations on the present state of society and
government, with a comparative view of the politics of Europe and
America. These remarks were written with a degree of generous warmth,
when alluding to the enslaved state of the labouring majority, perfectly
in unison with Maria's mode of thinking.

She read them over and over again; and fancy, treacherous fancy, began to
sketch a character, congenial with her own, from these shadowy
outlines.--"Was he mad?" She re-perused the marginal notes, and they
seemed the production of an animated, but not of a disturbed imagination.
Confined to this speculation, every time she re-read them, some fresh
refinement of sentiment, or acuteness of thought impressed her, which
she was astonished at herself for not having before observed.

What a creative power has an affectionate heart! There are beings who
cannot live without loving, as poets love; and who feel the electric
spark of genius, wherever it awakens sentiment or grace. Maria had often
thought, when disciplining her wayward heart, "that to charm, was to be
virtuous." "They who make me wish to appear the most amiable and good in
their eyes, must possess in a degree," she would exclaim, "the graces and
virtues they call into action."

She took up a book on the powers of the human mind; but, her attention
strayed from cold arguments on the nature of what she felt, while she
was feeling, and she snapt the chain of the theory to read Dryden's
Guiscard and Sigismunda.

Maria, in the course of the ensuing day, returned some of the books, with
the hope of getting others--and more marginal notes. Thus shut out from
human intercourse, and compelled to view nothing but the prison of vexed
spirits, to meet a wretch in the same situation, was more surely to find
a friend, than to imagine a countryman one, in a strange land, where the
human voice conveys no information to the eager ear.

"Did you ever see the unfortunate being to whom these books belong?"
asked Maria, when Jemima brought her supper. "Yes. He sometimes walks
out, between five and six, before the family is stirring, in the
morning, with two keepers; but even then his hands are confined."

"What! is he so unruly?" enqui