above?

"Have you communicated this view to your brother and sister?" asked
Dulcibel.

"I have talked with them for a whole evening, but I do think Sister Ann
is possessed too," replied Joseph Putnam. "She fairly raves sometimes.
You know how bitterly she feels about that old church quarrel, when a
small minority of the Parish succeeded in preventing the permanent
settlement of her sister's husband as minister. She seems to have the
idea that all that party are emissaries of Satan. I do not wonder her
little girl should be so nervous and excitable, being the child of such
a nervous, high-strung woman. But I am going to see them again this
afternoon; will you go too, Master Raymond?'

"I think not," replied the latter with a smile, "I should do harm, I
fear, instead of good. I will stay here and talk with Mistress Dulcibel
a little while longer."

Master Putnam departed, and then the conversation became of a lighter
character. The young Englishman told Dulcibel of his home in the old
world, and of his travels in France and Switzerland. And they talked of
all those little things which young people will--little things, but
which afford constant peeps into each other's mind and heart. Dulcibel
thought she had never met such a cultivated young man, although she had
read of such; and he felt very certain that he never met with such a
lovely young woman. Not that she was over intelligent--one of those
precociously "smart" young women that, thanks to the female colleges and
the "higher culture" are being "developed" in such alarming numbers
nowadays. If she had been such a being, I fancy Master Raymond would
have found her less attractive. Ah, well, after a time perhaps, we of
the present day shall have another craze--that of barbarism--in which
the "coming woman" shall pride herself mainly upon possessing a strong,
healthy and vigorous physical organization, developed within the
feminine lines of beauty, and only a reasonable degree of intelligence
and "culture." And then I hope we shall see the last of walking female
encyclopedias, with thin waists, and sickly and enfeebled bodies; fit to
be the mothers only of a rapidly dwindling race, even if they have the
wish and power to become mothers at all.

I am not much of a believer in love at first sight, but certainly
persons may become very much interested in each other after a few hours'
conversation; and so it was in the case before us. When Ellis Raymond
took up his hat