claims to gentility. A runaway thief may wear a fashionably cut coat,
and a well-paid domestic flaunt in silks and satins.

Now, Flora knew nothing of all this; and she committed a great error in
choosing neat and respectable every-day clothing. The handsome, and the
very ordinary, would have answered her purpose much better.

If "necessity is the mother of invention," experience is the handmaid of
wisdom, and her garments fit well. Flora was as yet a novice to the
world and its ways. She had much to learn from a stern and faithful
preceptress, in a cold, calculating school.

CHAPTER VII.

HOW MISS WILHELMINA CARR AND FLORA BECAME ACQUAINTED.

Among the many persons who called upon Flora to talk over her projected
emigration was a Miss Wilhelmina Carr--a being so odd, so wayward, so
unlike the common run of mortals, that we must endeavour to give a
slight sketch of her to our readers. We do not possess sufficient
artistic skill to do Miss Wilhelmina justice; for if she had not
actually lived and walked the earth, and if we had not seen her with our
own eyes, and heard her with our own ears, we should have considered her
a very improbable, if not an impossible, variety of the human species
feminine. We have met with many absurd people in our journey through
life, but a more eccentric individual never before nor since has come
under our immediate observation.

Flora's means were far too limited for her to entertain company. Her
visitors were confined entirely to her own family, and a few old and
chosen friends, with whom she had been intimate from childhood. How,
then, did she become acquainted with this lady? Oddly enough; for
everything connected with Miss Carr was odd, and out of the common way.

There was a mystery, too, about Miss Carr, which had kept the gossips
busy for the last four months, and clever and prying as they were--quite
models in their way--not one of them had been able to come at the
solution of the riddle.

One hot day during the preceding summer, Miss Wilhelmina walked into the
town, wearing a man's broad-brimmed straw hat, and carrying a cane in
her hand, with a very small dog trotting at her heels. She inquired at
the first hotel in the town for lodgings, and hired two very handsome
apartments of Mrs. Turner, who kept very respectable lodgings, and was
patronised by the best families in the neighbourhood. Miss Wilhelmina
paid three months' rent in advance; she brought no servant,