lly. Miss Walladmor had every excuse: she was a mere
child, and quite inexperienced: Captain Nicholas--who had from his
youth been placed in stations of command, and had just come from a
service in which as an Englishman he had been greatly respected and
admitted to intimacy with the staff of the patriot army,--was
distinguished by a remarkable dignity of manners and deportment: the
style of his sentiments, naturally lofty, was now exalted by love: and
finally he had in all probability saved Miss Walladmor's life. These
were strong appeals to a young heart: doubtless it did not weaken them
that the noble expression of his countenance was then embellished by
the graces of early youth (for he was not twenty), and yet unsaddened
by internal suffering--which has since given him the look of a person
older than he really is. Above all perhaps there pleaded for him in
Miss Walladmor's heart--that which must always plead powerfully with a
woman of virtuous sensibilities--the display which every look, word,
and gesture, made of his profound and passionate devotion. 'Never'
indeed (to quote our great poet, Mr. Bertram)--

"----never did young man fancy
With so eternal and so fix'd a soul:"[1]

"He hallowed the very air she breathed; doated on the very hem of her
garments; worshipped the very ground she trod on. This child, this
innocent child (for she was no more), guided the wild ungovernable
creature as absolutely and as easily as a mother guides her infant:
and, if Captain Nicholas had always been under such guidance, no tongue
(as I will warrant) would ever have had any cause to make free with his
name: there is no such a safeguard in this world to a young man under
the temptations which life presents as deep love for a virtuous woman.
The misery is--that for every thousand such women there is hardly one
man capable of such a love. No: men in this respect are brutal
creatures.

"But to return to Miss Walladmor: you will not wonder that, under the
circumstances I have mentioned, she did not discontinue her rides in
the woods of Tre Mawr: child as she was, her own heart told her that,
from a man animated by love so tender and profound, she could no more
have any thing to fear than she could from any third person whilst
under his protection. Hence she did not refuse to meet him: and, for
more than a year and a half, they carried on a clandestine
correspondence. Clandestine I call it with regard to the mode in whic