uppose that she had been merely exploring
an old and exhausted mine. Her flattery was not, as the world employs
it, an exaggerated estimate of existing qualities, but a grand poetic
and creative power, that actually begot the great sublime it praised.
Whatever your walk, rank, or condition in life, she instantly laid hold
of it to entrap you. No matter what your size, stature, or symmetry, she
could costume you in a minute! Her praises, like an elastic-web livery,
fitted all her slaves; and slaves were they of the most abject slavery,
who were led by the dictation of her crafty intelligence!

A word about poor Martha, and we have done; nor, indeed, is there any
need we should say more than that she was universally known as "Poor
Martha" by all their acquaintance. Oh! what patience, submission, and
long suffering it takes before the world will confer its degree of
Martyr, before they will condescend to visit, even with so cheap a thing
as compassion, the life of an enduring self-devotion. Martha had had but
one idol all her life, her brother; and although, when he married late
in years, she had almost died broken-hearted at the shock, she clung to
him and his fortunes, unable to separate from one to whose habits she
had been ministering for above thirty years. It was said that originally
she was a person of good common faculties, and a reasonably fair
knowledge of the world; but to see her at the time of which we now
speak, not a vestige remained of either, not a stone marked where the
edifice once stood. Nor can this ba matter of wonderment. Who could have
passed years amid all the phantasmagoria of that unreal existence, and
either not gone clean mad, or made a weak compromise with sanity,
by accepting everything as real? Poor Martha had exactly these two
alternatives, either to "believe the crusts mutton," or be eternally
shut out from all hope. Who can tell the long and terrible struggle such
a mind must have endured? what little bursts of honest energy repelled
by fear and timidity? what good intentions baffled by natural humility,
and the affection she bore her brother?

It may have nay, it did cost her much to believe this strange creed of
her sister-in-law; but she ended by doing so. So implicit was her faith,
that, like a true devotee, she would not trust the evidence of her own
senses, if opposed by the articles of her belief. The very pictures
at whose purchase she had been present, and whose restoration and