and brilliant interpretation and translation of AElia Laelia Crispis! Here is my old-fashioned English damsel, meek as a violet, fresh as a dewy daisy, and sweet as a bed of thyme and marjoram.  ’The style and method of life are quite changed, as well as the language, since the days of our ancestors, simple and plain as they were, courting their wives for their modesty, frugality, keeping at home, good housewifery, and other economical virtues then in reputation.  And when the young damsels were taught all these at home in the country at their parents’ houses; the portion they brought being more in virtue than money, she being a richer match than any one who could bring a million, and nothing else to commend her.  The virgins and young ladies of that golden age put their hands to the spindle, nor disdained the needle; were obsequious and helpful to their parents, instructed in the management of the family, and gave presage of making excellent wives.  Their retirements were devout and religious books, their recreations in the distillery and knowledge of plants and their virtues for the comfort of their poor neighbours, and use of the family, which wholesome diet and kitchen physic preserved in health.  Then things were natural, plain, and wholesome; nothing was superfluous, nothing necessary wanted.  The poor were relieved bountifully, and charity was as warm as the kitchen, where the fire was perpetual.’  Now, if Regina were only my child, I should with some modifications train her after this mellow old style.”

“Then I am truly thankful she is not my sister!  Fancy her pretty pearly fingers encrusted with gingerbread-dough; or her entrance into the library heralded by the perfume of moly, or of basil and sage, tolerable only as the familiars of a dish of sausage meat!  Don’t soil my dainty white dove with the dust and soot and rank odours that belong to the culinary realm.”

“Your white dove?  Do you propose to adopt her?  A month hence when you are on your way to India, what difference can it possibly make to you, whether she is as brown as a quail or black as a crow?  Before you come back, she will have been conscripted into the staid army of matrons, and transmogrified into stout Mrs. Ptolemy Thomson, or lean and careworn Mrs. Simon Smith, or worse than all, erudite Mrs. Professor Belshazzar Brown, spelling Hercules after the learned style, with the loss of the u, and the substitution of a k; or making the ghost of Ulysses tear his hair, by writing the name of his enchantress ’Kirke’!”

As Mrs. Lindsay spoke the smile vanished from her lips, and looking keenly at her son’s countenance she detected the change that crossed it, the sudden glow that mounted to the edge of his hair.

Avoiding her eyes, he answered hastily:  “Suppose those distinguished gentlemen you mention chance to be scholars, savans, and disposed to follow the advice of Joubert in making their matrimonial selection:  ’We should choose for a wife only the woman we should choose for a friend, were she a man.’  Think you mere habits of domesticity, or skill in herbalism, would arrest and fix their fancy?”