ulous. Your kindness I always can rely
upon, and I hope in the end to earn his as well."

"My dear, he has never been unkind to you. I am certain that you never
can say that of him. Major Hockin unkind to a poor girl like you!"

"The last thing I wish to claim is any body's pity," I answered, less
humbly than I should have spoken, though the pride was only in my tone,
perhaps. "If people choose to pity me, they are very good, and I am not
at all offended, because--because they can not help it, perhaps, from
not knowing any thing about me. I have nothing whatever to be pitied
for, except that I have lost my father, and have nobody left to care for
me, except Uncle Sam in America."

"Your Uncle Sam, as you call him, seems to be a very wonderful man,
Erema," said Mrs. Hockin, craftily, so far as there could be any craft
in her; "I never saw him--a great loss on my part. But the Major went
up to meet him somewhere, and came home with the stock of his best tie
broken, and two buttons gone from his waistcoat. Does Uncle Sam make
people laugh so much? or is it that he has some extraordinary gift of
inducing people to taste whiskey? My husband is a very--most abstemious
man, as you must be well aware, Miss Wood, or we never should have been
as we are, I am sure. But, for the first time in all my life, I
doubted his discretion on the following day, when he had--what shall I
say?--when he had been exchanging sentiments with Uncle Sam."

"Uncle Sam never takes too much in any way," I replied to this new
attack; "he knows what he ought to take, and then he stops. Do you think
that it may have been his 'sentiments,' perhaps, that were too strong
and large for the Major?"

"Erema!" cried Mrs. Hockin, with amazement, as if I had no right to
think or express my thoughts on life so early; "if you can talk politics
at eighteen, you are quite fit to go any where. I have heard a great
deal of American ladies, and seen not a little of them, as you know.
But I thought that you called yourself an English girl, and insisted
particularly upon it."

"Yes, that I do; and I have good reason. I am born of an old English
family, and I hope to be no disgrace to it. But being brought up in a
number of ways, as I have been without thinking of it, and being quite
different from the fashionable girls Major Hockin likes to walk with--"

"My dear, he never walks with any body but myself!"

"Oh yes, I remember! I was thinking of the deck. There are