ight, and only the sigh and rustle of
kneeling worshippers break the stillness of the aisles. It was small
enough for a nun's apartment, and dainty in its neatness as the waxen
cell of a bee. The bed and low window were draped in spotless white,
with fringes of Mary's own knotting. A small table under the
looking-glass bore the library of a well-taught young woman of those
times. "The Spectator," "Paradise Lost," Shakspeare, and "Robinson
Crusoe" stood for the admitted secular literature, and beside them the
Bible and the works then published of Mr. Jonathan Edwards. Laid a
little to one side, as if of doubtful reputation, was the only novel
which the stricter people in those days allowed for the reading of their
daughters: that seven-volumed, trailing, tedious, delightful old bore,
"Sir Charles Grandison,"--a book whose influence in those times was so
universal, that it may be traced in the epistolary style even of the
gravest divines. Our little heroine was mortal, with all her divinity,
and had an imagination which sometimes wandered to the things of earth;
and this glorious hero in lace and embroidery, who blended rank,
gallantry, spirit, knowledge of the world, disinterestedness, constancy,
and piety, sometimes walked before her, while she sat spinning at her
wheel, till she sighed, she hardly knew why, that no such men walked the
earth now. Yet it is to be confessed, this occasional raid of the
romantic into Mary's balanced and well-ordered mind was soon
energetically put to rout, and the book, as we have said, remained on
her table under protest,--protected by being her father's gift to her
mother during their days of courtship. The small looking-glass was
curiously wreathed with corals and foreign shells, so disposed as to
indicate an artistic eye and skilful hand; and some curious Chinese
paintings of birds and flowers gave rather a piquant and foreign air to
the otherwise homely neatness of the apartment.

Here in this little retreat Mary spent those few hours which her
exacting conscience would allow her to spare from her busy-fingered
household-life; here she read and wrote and thought and prayed;--and
here she stands now, arraying herself for the tea company that
afternoon. Dress, which in our day is becoming in some cases the whole
of woman, was in those times a remarkably simple affair. True, every
person of a certain degree of respectability had state and festival
robes; and a certain camphor-wood brass-