SIONS.

It often happens that a proud, austere person, so grounded in opinions
and prejudices as to be considered above and beyond ordinary influences,
will all at once, give heart and reason up to passionate or capricious
fondness for some individual--often a very child--and yield everything
to persuasion when reason is utterly rejected.

Indeed, few people like to be convinced; but the strongest mind ever
bestowed on man or woman finds something gratifying to self-love in the
persuasive enticements of affection.

This singular moral phenomenon astonished the neighbors and household of
Lady Carset when she gave herself up, with the abandon of a child, to
the caressing young creature, who had, it seemed, appeared in her home
to win her back from the very brink of the grave, and make the sunset of
her long life brighter with love than the dawn had been.

There was nothing in the young girl which did not seem beautiful to the
old relative. Her originality, which made the well-trained servants
stare, seemed the perfection of piquant grace to one whose fastidious
tastes had been an example to the whole neighborhood. In her estimation
Lady Clara could do nothing which was not in itself loveliest and best.
The old lady had been so long without an object of affection, that her
love of this girl became almost a monomania.

"I have an atonement to make," she would say to herself in excuse for
this extraordinary and most pleasant subjugation; "for years and years I
have driven this young creature from me because of what, I am almost
convinced, were unfounded suspicions against her father and that woman.
It is but just that I should accept my grandchild with generous
confidence; and she deserves it--she deserves it."

After reasoning in this fashion awhile the repentant old lady would rack
her brain for some new device by which this bright creature, who had
come like a sunbeam into her house, might be persuaded never to leave it
again. It was not altogether the selfishness of affection that actuated
this honorable woman. It was hard to believe that a Carset could have
acted unjustly, or even be mistaken; but, once convinced of that, her
very pride insisted on a generous atonement. Never in her life had she
been so humiliated as when the sight of those diamonds convinced her of
the cruel charge which she had maintained for years against a person
innocent of the offence imputed to her. She remembered, with
compunction, how m