accomplishing their descent into the lower regions.

"That rascally soldier," said Morton, "wants nothing but a tail to make
him a full-rigged monkey, and that lovely girl is about to be sacrificed
to him."

"Poor girl!" said Coffin; "it's bad enough to marry a sojer, any how;
but to marry such a critter as that is going it a little too fine."

Poor Isabella, who had heard and properly understood every syllable of
their conversation, was exceedingly affected. She had heard a person,
whose appearance and manners approached her _beau ideal_ of a gentleman,
expressing, in warm and energetic language, the liveliest compassion for
her, and guessing (for she could not imagine how he could know with
certainty) her exact situation, and manifesting an apparently sincere
and hearty interest towards her. Although her uncle had forborne to
trouble her upon that hateful subject, after he had first proposed it,
she knew his disposition too well to regard the reprieve as an
abandonment of his original design.

As she turned away to conceal her emotion from her cousins, her
streaming eyes encountered those of Morton. The young seaman was shocked
and alarmed at her tears, though he had not the most distant suspicion
that she had understood a word that had been said. Her beauty had first
attracted his notice--it was so un-Spanish, and so nearly resembling
that of New England ladies; the pensive expression of her countenance
had excited a lively interest and curiosity towards her; but her tears,
the evidence of that "secret grief" that the heart, and only the heart,
knoweth, had called up all the sympathies of his heart.

I believe there are few men, who deserve the name, that are proof
against a woman's tears, and there are few such men, who, when they
perceive a woman, especially a young and beautiful one, oppressed with
grief, anxiety, or distress, do not feel an irresistible impulse to
assist and relieve her.

It may be objected that I have made my hero fall in love at first sight.
To this I answer that I cannot spare time to lead him step by step
through all the crooks and turns of the bewitching passion; secondly,
love is _not_ like the consumption; people do not go gradually into it
by a beaten road, every foot of which is marked and designated by its
appropriate and peculiar symptoms. "Nemo est repente vitiosus," says
Juvenal--nobody becomes completely depraved all at once; very true, but
folks certainly do, to my certain kn