when she would gravely ask, if, like her school-mates, she
might not go to a dancing school, she would be told that her papa and
mamma had promised God to bring her up for Heaven, and that they would
not be doing that if they fitted her for the gay world: that she must
not forget that she was a baptized child of the Church. If she looked
doubtful, or was inclined to urge the matter, we would ask her if she
wanted us to break our word to God--which, like any other
conscientious child, she would recoil from. When in her sixteenth
year, however, while at boarding-school in Mobile, she expressed a
greater desire than ever before to take lessons in dancing. They were
given in the school, and confined to the pupils; not at night, but in
the afternoon, when she required exercise instead of sleep; and we
determined, after serious and prayerful reflection, to indulge her in
this very natural wish, believing that longer opposition might be
attended with a still stronger desire for the forbidden thing, which
she could see no harm in, nor we, if confined to the social circle. We
knew that God alone could make her a Christian--could turn her heart
from the love of the world to that of holiness--and we did not believe
that He would be less willing to do so because of our yielding to her
wishes in this respect, which, our child clearly understood, was done,
not from inconsistency on our part, or a vain desire to see her admired
in the world; but from a conviction that, at her age, some
consideration should be shown to her reasonable desires; especially as
she was far from esteeming this indulgence as a license to unbounded
worldliness; that the theater and the ball-room were to be
conscientiously avoided, as the road that led directly away from all
that was pure, holy and happy. And I am now gratified in saying that
we have never had cause to regret the course we pursued in this matter
--which ceased to be overrated as soon as its depths were sounded--our
daughter finding, by experience, how empty and shallow this greatly
overrated enjoyment is, compared to others, even of a worldly and
social nature; how far it falls below the more refined joys of a less
conspicuous but more reasonable and choice character, which the
cultivated alone can appreciate.

The young lady days, no less than those of her childhood, your
mother will tell you, were happy days. Restrained in that only which
her parents, and her own conscience, deemed wro