light and elastic as Virgil's Camilla,
required the assistance of such an old weather-beaten beau as myself.
How often have I been pouted at by the ripest, rosiest, lips in the
world, for omitting to wait upon their owner home, on a dark, stormy,
evening, and half a mile out of my way, simply because I preferred the
company I was with, to the half-mile _heat_! I do not know that I have
ever felt very desirous of living my life over again; but I confess I
should like to go back, say, to the age of three or four and twenty,
merely to take a few lessons in the graces, and then "jump the life to
come," as far as where I am now, namely, _thirty or forty_.

By Mr. Coffin's management, Morton and Isabella were much of the time
together, and both instinctively avoided any allusion to painful
subjects. He described to her the various implements used in the
whale-fishery, gave her a short account of the voyage, and of the
different parts of America, and of the islands in the Pacific, that he
had visited; and, in short, exerted himself to please and entertain her,
and was successful.

When in the society of those we love, and from whom we are soon to
separate, perhaps forever, how much we can manage to say in a little
time! how earnestly do we strive to render delightful those moments,
perhaps the last that we are ever to pass with those friends! Dr.
Johnson says, the approach of death wonderfully concentrates one's
ideas; so does the approach of the hour of parting.

Isabella heard herself, for the first time, for many years, addressed in
the language of respectful politeness, and unassuming common sense; the
pictures of refined, polished, and enlightened, society, drawn in the
few excellent English authors her mother had left her, seemed realized
and presented to her eyes, in all the richness of life. She did not
stop to analyse, or try to explain to herself the peculiarly delightful
feelings that occupied her mind; though if she had been left alone for
five minutes, her own good sense would have told her it was love: that
pure, unalloyed, unreflecting, ardent, _first_ love, that, like the
whooping-cough and the measles, we never have but once; though some
patients have it earlier in life, and more severely, than others.

Ladies will never admit, and never have admitted, from the time the
stone-masons and hod-carriers struck work upon the tower of Babel, (for
want of a circulating medium of speech, that would be taken at par