he good Colonel fully understood, and though sometimes chafed by
her incessant taunts, he knew her real worth, and had long since learned
to wear his fetters as an ornament.

Since their arrival in Virginia, Heaven had blessed the happy pair with
a lovely daughter--a bliss for which they long had hoped and prayed, but
hoped and prayed in vain. If hope deferred, however, maketh the heart
sick, it loses none of its freshness and delight when it is at last
realized, and the fond hearts of her parents were overflowing with love
for this their only child. At the time at which our story commences,
Virginia Temple (she was called after the fair young colony which gave
her birth) had just completed her nineteenth year. Reared for the most
part in the retirement of the country, she was probably not possessed of
those artificial manners, which disguise rather than adorn the gay
butterflies that flutter in the fashionable world, and which passes for
refinement; but such conventional proprieties no more resemble the
innate refinement of soul which nature alone can impart, than the
plastered rouge of an old faded dowager resembles the native rose which
blushes on a healthful maiden's cheek. There was in lieu of all this, in
the character of Virginia Temple, a freshness of feeling and artless
frankness, and withal a refined delicacy of sentiment and expression,
which made the fair young girl the pride and the ornament of the little
circle in which she moved.

Under the kind tuition of her father, who, in his retired life,
delighted to train her mind in wholesome knowledge, she possessed a
great advantage over the large majority of her sex, whose education, at
that early period, was wofully deficient. Some there were indeed (and in
this respect the world has not changed much in the last two centuries),
who were tempted to sneer at accomplishments superior to their own, and
to hint that a book-worm and a bluestocking would never make a useful
wife. But such envious insinuations were overcome by the care of her
judicious mother, who spared no pains to rear her as a useful as well as
an accomplished woman. With such a fortunate education, Virginia grew up
intelligent, useful and beloved; and her good old father used often to
say, in his bland, gentle manner, that he knew not whether his little
Jeanie was more attractive when, with her favorite authors, she stored
her mind with refined and noble sentiments, or when, in her little check
a