were to be seen at
intervals some of maturer years, full-blown flowers among the opening
buds, with that conscious look upon their faces which so many women wear
during the period when they never meet a single man without having his
monosyllable ready for him,--tied as they are, poor things! on the rock
of expectation, each of them an Andromeda waiting for her Perseus.

"Who is that girl in ringlets,--the fourth in the third row on the
right?" said Master Langdon.

"Charlotte Ann Wood," said Miss Darley;--"writes very pretty poems."

"Oh!--And the pink one, three seats from her? Looks bright; anything in
her?"

"Emma Dean,--day-scholar,--Squire Dean's daughter,--nice girl,--second
medal last year."

The master asked these two questions in a careless kind of way, and did
not seem to pay any too much attention to the answers.

"And who and what is that," he said,--"sitting a little apart
there,--that strange, wild-looking girl?"

This time he put the real question he wanted answered;--the other two
were asked at random, as masks for the third.

The lady-teacher's face changed;--one would have said she was frightened
or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the
master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up;--she was
winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a
kind of reverie.

Miss Darley drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide
her lips. "Don't look at her as if we were talking about her," she
whispered softly;--"that is Elsie Venner."

MEXICO.

A certain immortal fool, who had, like most admitted fools, great
wisdom, once said, that the number of truces between the Christians and
Saracens in Palestine made an old man of him; for he had known three of
them, so that he must be at least one hundred and fifty years old. The
saying occurs in a romance, to be sure, but one which is not half so
romantic as the best-accredited decade of Titus Livius, and is quite as
authentic as most of what Sir Archibald Alison says, when he writes on
the United States.

What Palestine and the Crusades were to the witty son of Witless, Mexico
and her politics are to moderns, not even excepting the predestined
devourers of the Aztec land, who ought to know something of the country
they purpose bringing within the full light of civilization through the
aid of slaughter and slavery. There are some myriads of "Americans of
the North" y