ve me her mother's miniature. She had cut off a lock of her hair,
which she had not done for all the world of her admirers--else she would
long have gone bald.

Now it happened that though there were a good many dressmakers in Eden
Valley, including some that worked out for so much a day, there was only
one Ladies' Milliner and Mantua-maker. This was the sister of our
infant-mistress, Miss Huntingdon. Her establishment was in itself a kind
of select academy. She had an irreproachable connection, and though she
worked much and well with her nimble fingers, she got most of her labour
free by an ingenious method.

She initiated into her mysteries none of the poorer girls of the place,
who might in time be tempted to "set up for themselves," and so spoil
their employer's market. She received only, as temporary boarders,
daughters of good houses, generally pretty girls looking forward with
some confidence to managing houses of their own. At that time every girl
who set up to be anything in our part of the country aspired to make her
own dresses and build the imposing fabric of her own bonnets.

So Miss Huntingdon had a full house of pretty maidens who came as
"approvers"--a fanciful variation of "improvers" invented by Miss
Huntingdon herself, and used whenever she spoke of "My young ladies,"
which she did all day long--or at least as often as she was called into
the "down-stairs parlour," where (as in a nunnery) ordinary business was
transacted.

A good many of the elder girls whom I had known at the Academy had
migrated there at the close of their period of education--several who,
though great maidens of seventeen or eighteen, had hardly appeared upon
my father's purely classical horizon--seen by him only at the Friday's
general review of English and history, and taught for the rest of the
week by little Mr. Stephen, by myself--and in sewing, fancy-work, and
the despised samplers by Miss Huntingdon, the ever diligent, who, to
say the truth, acted in this matter as jackal to her elder sister's
lion.

In return she got a chamber, a seat at the table with the young ladies,
and a home. Nor will I say that Miss Seraphina, Ladies' Milliner and
Mantua-maker, was not a good and kind sister to Miss Rebecca, the little
teacher at thirty pounds a year in the Infant Department at the Academy
of Eden Valley.

But my mother in her time--Aunt Janet, even--had passed that way, though
Miss Huntingdon considered Jen one of her failur