the best description, but in slight
mourning, which she always wore; and on her head, also, a cap rather
plainer than the mode, but of the finest and most expensive materials:
nothing could be more dignified and complete than her appearance.

When first Myra was introduced to her she was both daunted and
disappointed; the gravity, amounting almost to sternness, with which
Mrs. Fisher received her, and explained to her the duties she was
expected to perform, awed in the first place, and mortified in the
second. The establishment of this fashionable modiste, with which Myra
had associated nothing but laces and ribbons, dresses and trimmings,
embroidery and feathers, flattery and display, struck cold and dull upon
her imagination. She was introduced into a handsomely but very plainly
furnished sitting-room, where not one trace of any of those pretty
things were to be seen, and heard of nothing but regularity of hours,
persevering industry, quaker neatness, attention to health, and the
strictest observance of the rules of what she thought quite a prudish
propriety.

Mrs. Fisher's life had been one of vicissitude, and in its vicissitudes,
she, a strong, earnest-minded woman, had learned much. She had known
sorrow, privation, cruelly hard labor, and the loneliness of utter
desolation of the heart She had, moreover, been extremely beautiful, and
she had experienced those innumerable perils to which such a gift
exposes an unprotected girl, struggling for her bread, under the
cruelest circumstances of oppressive labor. Every description of
hardship, and every description of temptation belonging to perhaps the
hardest and almost the most dangerous position of female life, Mrs.
Fisher had gone through.

She had outlived its sufferings and escaped its snares.

The suffering, thanks to one of the finest constitutions in the world;
the snares, thanks to what she always, with inexhaustible gratitude,
acknowledged as the special mercy and providence of God.

An orphan at the dangerous age of seventeen, the lovely blooming young
creature was placed by her friends in one of the most fashionable and
largest milliners' establishments at that time in London, and had found
herself at once miserable and excited, oppressed and flattered.

The mistress of this flourishing house, intent upon making a rapid
fortune before the years in which she could enjoy it should come to a
close, cared little--I might say nothing--for the welfare of the