MARY BEATRICE OF MODENA.2 men, to none of whom (for ages at least) did the thought | the conduct of those women to their father has been occur, that they contained in them mines of wealth, is mentioned in history, must have had an unwholesome a curious phenomenon; nor is it less remarkable, that effect upon the moral sensibilities of the nation. We it was left for a man, whose name and occupation are have little faith in the reality of that public virtue wholly disassociable from science, to convert these which pursues a political end, however desirable, by the fugitive vapours into substantial wealth."1 sacrifice of the most graceful and indispensable of the natural affections. And still more, when we find that the object actually arrived at is personal aggrandizement, while the affections sacrificed are the most sacred, and the most closely linked with whatever is good in our natures, which can hold a place in the human breast, the evidence of purity of intention must be strong indeed, to overcome the shrinking of heart with which we contemplate such a moral anomaly. Even the stern justice of the elder Brutus is sufficiently revolting to our natural feelings; but the cold-blooded ambition of James's daughters fills us with disgust, unmitigated by anything lofty or imposing-anything greatly daring-in the means by which ts end was attained. Can we say that their guilt was less than that which brought down the patriarch's prophetic the earth to servile debasement? When history shall, curse upon his son, and consigned one whole family of in after times, re-echo the dying words of Madame Roland, "O liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!" we fear that our own "glorious" revolution, in some of its incidents, will not be absent from its thoughts; that it will think of the daughters who, to gain a crown for themselves," tied sharp tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture," to a father's heart, consigning him in sorrow and exile to that bitterest of all feelings that can afflict the heart of a man- the feeling "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is THE time has happily gone by when it would have been held dangerous or disloyal to express sympathy for the fallen fortunes of the royal house of Stuart. The ungenerous spirit in which the historians of the last century, with very few exceptions, found it, perhaps, necessary to write the annals of the most interesting period of our history, is now rapidly disappearing. We have no longer occasion to feel that a reverential regard for the sacred claims of misfortune may be in any respect inconsistent with an earnest zeal for the preservation of our constitutional liberties. We may follow with respectful commiseration a discrowned king into his exile, without being chargeable with any desire to restore arbitrary power; and we may accord the due measure of respect to the conscientious adherence to a proscribed faith which lost him his crown, without incurring the suspicion that our affection for our own Church has suffered any diminution. The flame of party zeal, in connexion with this subject, is dying out for want of sustenance. There exist now no persons in the world, whose rights or interests are liable to be affected by the judgment which may be formed of the revolution of 1688; and juster and more moderate views of the subject have therefore come to prevail. There can be no stronger proof of the blinding in fluence of political partizanship, than that the conduct of the daughters of James the Second to their father has been hitherto regarded with so much indulgence. While we have been weeping over the imaginary sorrows of Lear, and execrating the crimes of his unnatural offspring, we have been almost insensible to the real afflictions of James, and to the scarcely less unnatural ingratitude of his children. If Mary and Anne had not the energy and unscrupulous audacity, with which Shakspeare invests the characters of Regan and Goneril, it is not the less true, that their whole conduct shows them to have been equally devoid not only of the principle of filial duty, but even of the instinct of natural affection. After every possible allowance which can be made for the circumstances into the stream of which they had been cast, and which they probably had little power to control, there remains enough to make the place which they must occupy in history, a very unen. viable one. If they could not have saved their father, they need not, at any rate, have lent themselves to his overthrow. The selfish inanity of their characters has long since made them the objects of something as near to contempt, as it is easy to feel towards princesa feeling which the more impartial estimate of their career now generally formed, is rapidly converting into a more active one of strong moral repugnance. "Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a child, It is right that it should be so. It cannot be but that the general indulgence, even commendation, with which (1) From Dr. Bowring's Report on the Statistics of Tuscany. (2) Lives of the Queens of England, by Agnes Strickland. Vol. ix. containing the first part of the life of Mary Beatrice of Modena, Queen Consort of James II. London: Colburn, 1846. To have a thankless child." Our interest in the misfortunes of James becomes still warmer at discovering the influence which they seem to have exercised upon his character. Without entering into minute particulars, it is sufficiently clear, that, with some attractive points in his disposition, he was, in the days of his prosperity, too largely imbued with the prevailing vices of his rank and age. It was a time of general laxity and moral debasement, especially in the higher walks of life; and James shared more than enough in the taint with which the atmosphere he lived in was infected. His adversity seems, in truth, to have brought a healing balm with it. Though, like the toad, ugly and venomous, it wore "a precious jewel in its head," which, with a talismanic virtue, cleansed away the moral leprosy that clove to him. He became, -no doubt a sadder, (who can wonder at that ?)—certainly a wiser and a better man. The loss of his earthly crown seems to have set him, in right earnest, upon the search after what no man yet searched for in earnest without finding, a heavenly one. His piety seems to have been fervent and sincere, not a mere splenetic disgust with a world whose pomps and vanities had forsaken him, but an enduring principle implanted within him, and bearing its appropriate fruits. The message of forgiveness which, with his dying breath, he sent to his undutiful daughter, and the injunction which, at the same time, he gave to his son, that if ever he came to his throne, he should not take vengeance upon his enemies, attest more strongly than any thing else can the reality of the change which his sufferings had wrought upon him. It is not of James, however, that we are now to speak, but of his wife-of her who, though innocent of any share in his political misdoings, bore the full burden of his punishment; who having, with the not unnatural reluctance of an unsophisticated girl of fifteen, united herself to a middle-aged man-a reluctance little qualified by the knowledge that he was the heir presumptive to a throne-so schooled her young affections, that, long before their union came to a close, her heart had become his as devotedly as if he had been from the first the object of her most passionate love; who, in the time of his sorrow and suffering, became his comforter, his counsellor, his support; who, with a constancy of affection never surpassed in any sphere of life, upheld his feeble steps, as, under the weight of premature old age, he tottered to the grave, and with the soft hand of womanly tenderness smoothed his dying pillow, clinging to her desolate husband until she was forced away lest the poignancy of her grief should disturb his last moments. This pattern of a wife, of whom, though a British queen, so deep and envenomed has been the prejudice with which the character of every one connected with the unhappy Stuarts has been regarded, we have hitherto known little or nothing, save the vile and coarse calumny of which she has been the object, is the subject of this volume of Miss Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England. There is something very peculiar in the view which we obtain of history in tracing the lives of Royal Consorts. The great outside world is never entirely shut out. The chariot of state is always to be seen, the sound of its wheels is ever in our ears,--we feel that the events we are dealing with are at no time entirely disconnected from it, though sometimes joined by a thread so fine as to be nearly invisible,-that they often influence its course, more frequently are borne irresistibly along with it; at the same time we are not in the busy whirl; we look down upon it, as it were, from some private casement, and its sound is softened and subdued, ere it reaches us, by the thick folds of domestic drapery which shut us in. We leave the beaten highway of history, with all its roughness and dust, and follow the same course along a smooth grassy path, thickly shaded by overhanging boughs from the glare of the noon-day sun, but opening up, every now and then, bright peeps into the world around, and never removing us altogether from the sight and sound of it. ances practised by the sisters of Chaillot and their royal We shall now give a few particulars of the life of She was a daughter of the illustrious house of Esté, immortalized by Tasso, Ariosto, and Dante. This family had long ruled over the united duchies of Ferrara and Modena; but, about a hundred years before the birth of Mary, the duchy of Ferrara had been seized by the pope, and annexed to the papal dominions, under the pretence that it was a fief of the papal empire; and the representative of the family was after that only known as Duke of Modena. The father of Mary Beatrice was Alphonso d'Esté, duke of Modena, son of Francisco the Great and Maria Farnese. Her mother, Laura Martinozzi, was the daughter of Count Hieronimo Martinozzi da Fano, a Roman nobleman of ancient family, and Margaret, sister of Cardinal Mazarine. She was the eldest child of her parents, and was born on the 5th of October, 1658. Her father, an able and accomplished tance to unite herself to James, and was not without its influence upon the whole of her after life. The present biography, if not the most intrinsically interesting, is in one point of view the most valuable accession to our stores of historical information of those which Miss Strickland has yet given to the world. The subject of it, as she tells us, is one whose life has never before been written with any attempt at truthful delineation. Had she done no more than so sifted and arranged the materials already possessed by the world, as to bring out the truth from under the load of interested misrepresentation under which it lay concealed, she would have done much to deserve our thanks; but, in addition to that, her in-prince, died while she was almost an infant, leaving her dustry and research have brought before us a large and a younger brother to the guardianship of their amount of information which had been concealed from mother, and their uncle, prince Rinaldo d'Esté, afterthe investigations of all former historians. The mate- wards Cardinal d'Esté. She was educated at home, rials of which she has made use, and the means by which under the care of a governess, until she was nine years she obtained access to them, are thus described by her: old, after which she was sent to finish her education in "The materials for the biography of the Consort of a convent, where she imbibed a taste for a life of reliJames II. are chiefly derived from the unpublished let-gious seclusion, which contributed greatly to her relueters. journals, and documents, of the period. Many of these, and indeed the most important, are locked up in the secret archives of France; papers that are guarded with such extreme jealousy from the curiosity of foreigners, that nothing less than the powerful influence of M. Guizot himself could have procured access to those collections. Through the kindness and liberality of that accomplished statesman-historian, every facility for research and transcription was granted during my residence in Paris in the spring and summer of 1844. The result was fortunate beyond my most sanguine expectations, in the discovery of inedited letters, records, and documents, connected with the personal history of the beautiful and unfortunate princess whose memoir occupies the present volume of the Lives of the Queens of England. Not the least curious of these records is part of a MS. diary, kept, apparently, by one of the nuns of Chaillot, of the sayings and doings of the exiled queen, during her occasional retreats to that convent after the death of James II., full of characteristic traits and anecdotes. It is quaintly, but pleasantly written, though some times wearisome at times, from the frequent allusions to the devotional exercises, the fasts, and other observ James's first wife, Ann Hyde, died in 1672, leaving two daughters. He seemed disposed a second time to seck for a wife among his brother's subjects, having actually given a written promise of marriage to Lady Bellasis, widow of Sir Henry Bellasis, a lady of invineable zeal for protestantism, and of unimpeachable character; but, the matter having come to the king his brother's ears, he interposed his authority to have it broken off, compelled Lady Bellasis to give up the promise, and engaged his brother in negotiations for marriage with a foreign princess. The person employed to arrange matters for James's marriage was his friend the Earl of Peterborough, who has left an amusing account, from which Miss Strickland quotes pretty fully, of his adventures in the course of several negotiations, which, one after the other, proved abortive, until that with the subject of this notice was, after many difficulties, at last brought to a successful issue. It was not without much difficulty that, after every other obstacle was removed, the unwillingness of Mary Beatrice to renounce her long-cherished desire of spending her days in a convent, for the sake of a union, however splendid, with a man whom she had never seen, and of whom she knew nothing but that he was twenty-five years older than herself, was overcome. She wept bitterly, and yielded at last only in obedience to the commands of her mother, whom she had never ventured to disobey. The marriage was solemnized on the 30th September, 1673, the Earl of Peterborough officiating as proxy for the royal bridegroom. Mary arrived in England on the 21st of November, and met her husband at Dover, whither he had gone to welcome her to her future home. James was delighted with his young bride. Her first impressions of him were different. Miss Strickland says: "Mary Beatrice in after years acknowledged that she did not like her lord at first. What girl of fifteen ever did like a spouse five-and-twenty years her senior?" James had enough good sense to take no notice of the childish aversion which she could not conceal, and treated her with the utmost kindness and affection. Her aversion, it will be seen, was not very long-lived. They were married over again in person that night by the Bishop of Oxford. Mary Beatrice was received with great favour by the king her brother-in-law, who continued to treat her with much kindness to the end of his life. She said of him in after years: "He was always kind to me, and was so truly amiable and good-natured that I loved him very much, even before I became attached to my lord the Duke of York." But she was, on her arrival, the object of a very different feeling on the part of the nation generally. We shall here have recourse to Miss Strickland's own words: “The reception of the youthful duchess, on her first appearance at Whitehall, was truly flattering, as she was treated with every mark of affection and distinction by their Majesties, and with much respect by the great ladies of the court and all the royal party; yet, observes Lord Peterborough, clouds hung heavy upon the brows of many others, who had a mind to punish what they could not prevent.' It was impossible for any thing to be more unpopular than the marriage of the heir presumptive to the crown with a Catholic princess. The disapprobation of parliament had been loudly, but fruitlessly, expressed. The ribald political rhymesters, who had already assailed James with a variety of disgusting lampoons on the subject of his Italian alliance, were preparing to aim their coarse shafts at his bride; but, when she appeared, her youth, her innocence, and surpassing loveliness, disarmed even their malignity; they found no point for attack. From others the young duchess received the most unbounded homage. King Charles ordered a silver medal to be struck in honour of his brother's marriage, in which half-length portraits of James and his bride appear, face to face, like Philip and Mary on a shilling.' The disparity in their age is strikingly apparent, for, though the royal admiral was still in the meridian pride of manhood, and reckoned at that time one of the finest men in his brother's court, his handsome but sternlymarked lineaments are in such strong contrast to the softness of contour, delicate features, and almost infantine expression of his youthful consort, that no one would take them for husband and wife. The dress of the young duchess is arranged with classical simplicity, and her hair negligently bound up with a fillet, over which the rich profusion of ringlets fall negligently, as if with the weight of their own luxuriance, on either side her face, and shade her graceful throat and bosom. As this princess was of that order of beauty to which the royal taste awarded the palm, and her natural charms were unmarred by vanity or affectation, she excited boundless admiration in the court of Charles II., where it was hoped that the purity of her manners and morals would have a restraining and beneficial effect." Mary Beatrice had been accompanied to England by her mother, the Duchess of Modena, who left her in something more than a month. She felt the separa tion bitterly; but she was now beginning to become reconciled to the society of her husband, for whom she was gradually imbibing an affection which, as she herself said after she was a widow, "increased with every year that they lived together, and received no interruption to the end of his life." Her fondness for him became such, she said, "as to amount to an engrossing passion which interfered with her spiritual duties, for she thought more of pleasing him than of serving her God; and that it was sinful for any one to love an earthly creature as she had loved her husband, but that her fault brought its own punishment in the pain she suffered at discovering that she was not the exclusive object of his regard." This last allusion Miss Strickland thus explains: :- -"James had unhappily formed habits and connexions disgraceful to himself, and inimical to the peace of his youthful consort. His conduct with several of the married ladies of the court, and even with those in her own household, afforded great cause for scandal; and of course there were busy tongues, eager to whisper every story of the kind to his bride. If Mary Beatrice had been a few years older at the time of her marriage, she would have understood the value of her own charms, and, instead of assailing her faithless lord with tears and passionate reproaches, she would have endeavoured to win him from her rivals by the graceful arts of captivation, for which she was well qualified. James was proud of her beauty, and flattered by her jealousy; he treated her with unbounded indulgence, as she herself acknowledged; but there was so little difference in age between her and his eldest daughter, that he appears only to have regarded her as a full-grown child, or a plaything, till the moral dignity of her character became developed by the force of circumstances, and he learned to look up to her with that admiration and respect which her virtues were calculated to excite. This triumph was not easily or quickly won; many a heart-ache and many a trial had Mary Beatrice to endure before that day arrived." Mary's first child, a daughter, was born on the 10th Jan. 1675. She had the child privately baptized a few hours after its birth, according to the rites of the Church of Rome; but Charles, when he was informed of it, disregarding her tears and expostulations, (for she was terrified at the thought of having been the means of incurring a sacrilege through the reiteration of the baptismal sacrament,) ordered the little princess to be borne with all due solemnity to the Chapel-royal, and had her christened there by a Protestant bishop, according to the rites of the Church of England. She was called Catharina Laura, out of compliment to the Queen and the Duchess of Modena. Her first baptism was kept a profound secret, and was only divulged by Mary Beatrice herself, many years after, to the Nuns of Chaillot. This child died at the age of ten months. A second daughter was born on the 18th August, 1676, which only lived to be five years old. Mary Beatrice was on the eve of her third confinement, when her husband's eldest daughter, Mary, was married to the Prince of Orange. She was present in the princess's bed-chamber, when this event-so fatal to the fortunes of herself, her husband, and her childrenwas solemnized. A jest of King Charles on the occasion is worth repeating. It would have been more pleasing, had it been less literally true-less suggestive of the existence even then of feelings and hopes, which were afterwards so signally displayed. He bade the Bishop of London " make haste with the ceremony, lest his sister should be delivered of a son in the meantime, and so spoil the marriage." Three days afterwards the boy whom his majesty had thus merrily anticipated was born. But he died of small pox when little more than a month old, to the great disappointment of the nation, and to the inexpressible grief of his parents, to whom his loss proved in every aspect of it an irreparable calamity. Mary Beatrice continued always on very friendly terms with James's daughters by his first wife. Before the Princess of Orange had been long married, reports reached England which suggested doubts of her happiness in her married state, and Mary Beatrice determined, with the permission of the king and her husband, to pay her a visit incognito, accompanied by the Princess Anne. The feelings which led to this visit are thus pleasingly described by Miss Strickland: "The unostentatious manner in which the duchess wished to make her visit to her step-daughter, the Princess of Orange, proves that it was simply for the satisfaction of secing her, and giving her the comfort of her sister's society, unrestrained by any of the formal and fatiguing ceremonials which royal etiquette would have imposed upon all parties, if she had appeared in her own character. Considering the extreme youth of the three ladies, the affectionate terms on which they had always lived together, and the conjugal infelicity of the lately wedded Princess of Orange at that time, her sickness and dejection, it is more than probable that Mary Beatrice undertook this expedition with the Princess Anne, in consequence of some private communication from the pining invalid, expressive of her anxious desire to see them, and confide to them some of the trials which weighed so heavily on her heart in that uncongenial land of strangers." The visit was a short, though apparently an agreeable one, and Mary Beatrice returned, after a few days' stay at the Hague, to find her lord vainly attempting to grapple with the fierce storm which had suddenly arisen in England, and which was got up for his destruction, known by the name of the Popish Plot. POPULAR YEAR-BOOK. October 17.-St. Ethelreda, who is commemorated on this day in the Kalendar of the Church of England, was the daughter of Anna and Heriswitha, King and Queen of East Anglia, and born at Exning, then the capital of that kingdom-now a little village in a detached secration to St. Ethelreda. Henceforth her life was October 18.-Feast of St. Luke. This apostle is supposed to have put off mortality about A.D. 70, in the eighty-fourth year of his age. His festival was first instituted A.D. 1130. It is cele brated by the Church of England. OLD CUSTOMS. Drake says in his "Eboracum" that St. Luke's day is known in York by the name of whip-dog-day, from a all the dogs that are seen in the streets on that festival. strange usage that school-boys have there of whipping This cruel practice is said with some probability to be in memory of the following circumstance. A priest who was celebrating Mass in one of the churches of York, unfortunately dropped the consecrated wafer, which was suddenly snatched up and swallowed by a dog. The anithe canine race throughout the city. mal was instantly killed, and a persecution inflicted upon The same writer remarks, part of Suffolk, that lies like an island in the eastern A fair is always kept in Mickle Gate, York, on St. Luke's day, for all sorts of small wares. It is commonly called Dish-Fair, from the great quantity of old custom used at this fair of bearing a wooden ladle wooden dishes, ladles, &c. brought to it. There is an in a sling on two stangs about it, carried by four sturdy labourers, and each labourer was formerly supported by another. This, without doubt, is a ridicule on the meanness of the wares brought to this fair, small bene FALGAR, which was fought on this day, 1805, between the October 21, is the anniversary of the BATTLE OF TraEnglish and the combined fleets of France and Spain. In this dreadful engagement, which lasted four hours, twenty sail of the enemy were sunk or destroyed, and and two Spanish admirals were made prisoners. The Admiral Villeneuve, the French commander-in-chief, British force consisted of twenty-seven, and that of the enemy of thirty-three, sail of the line - eighteen of which were French and fifteen Spanish. The gallant Nelson was wounded about the middle of the action, and died nearly at its close. October 25.-St. Crispin's Day. The name of this saint has a place in the Church of England Kalendar. The Latins commemorate him in conjunction with St. Crispinian. These holy persons were brothers of noble family, and born at Rome, whence No (A.D. 303) they travelled to Soissons in France, to propagate the Christian faith; and because, like St. Paul, they would not be chargeable to others for their maintenance, they "worked with their hands in the night, making shoes." Success attended their missionary endeavours, but it was unhappily of but short duration. sooner did the governor of the town (" the most implacable enemy to the Christian name,") hear of it than he summoned the saintly brethren to his tribunal. Butler relates that " they were victorious over this most inhuman judge, by the patience and constancy with which they bore the most cruel torments, and finished their course by the sword." "It is difficult," says Brady, "to account for the origin of the Kentish tradition, that they were buried near Lydd, which is, however, the popular belief of that neighbourhood; and a heap of stones on the beach, near a spot called STONE'S END, is to this day shown as the place of their interment.' These saints, on account of the trade they had recourse to at Soissons, have been selected as the patrons of shoemaking. In an old romance, a prince of the name of Crispin is represented as having exercised the above "art and mystery," and thence is supposed to be derived the expression of the Gentle Craft, as applied to it. In the sixth century a great church was built, under the invocation of SS. Crispin and Crispinian, and their shrine was richly adorned. So popular, indeed, were they in mediæval times, that in France, as well as in this country, they were not only considered as the patrons of the shoemakers, but that two societies were established, bearing the titles of Freres CordonniersBrother Shoemakers-the one under the protection of St. Crispin, the other of his martyred brother; the produce of whose labours was paid into a common stock, to furnish necessaries for the support of the monks of each society, and the surplus appropriated to the benefit of the poor. Hone remarks that, from the highest to the lowest, St. Crispin's is a day of "feasting and jollity" among the present race of shoemakers. On this festival, A. D. 1415, the celebrated battle of Agincourt was fought between the English, under King Henry V., and the French, under the constable d'Albret. The French had a force which, if prudently conducted, was sufficient to trample down the English in the open field. Henry had not, if we may believe some writers, more than the tenth of the French king's numbers; and, besides this, his men were worn out with sickness, and in want of many necessaries. The French were led on by able generals, and plentifully supplied with provisions. The English archers, as at Cressy, let fly a shower of arrows, which did great execution. A quantity of rain had fallen; and the clayey nature of the soil greatly hindered and perplexed the French troops. The field was too small to allow them room; the English archers taking their battle-axes, and, assisted by the men-at-arms, fell in among them, and the rout was soon general. It was the greatest victory that the English ever gained in France. There were ten thousand slain, and fourteen thousand prisoners; among both of these were several noblemen, and others of great reputation. The English only lost few men, and the Duke of York. Henry returned to England by way of Dover, the crowd plunged into the waves to meet him, and the conqueror was carried in their arms from his vessel to the beach. The road to London exhibited one triumphal procession. The lords, commons, and clergy, the mayor, aldermen, and citizens, conducted him into the capital; tapestry, representing the deeds of his ancestors, lined the walls of the houses; pageants were erected in the streets; sweet wines ran in the conduits; bands of children, tastefully arranged, sang his praise; and the whole population seemed intoxicated with joy. Shakspeare has given a speech to Henry V., before this memorable engagement, that will mark the Festival of St. Crispin to the end of time. "This day is called the Feast of Crispian. Then will he strip his sleeve, and show his scars. What feats they did that day. Then shall our names, And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, ISABELLA MORGAN; OR, RICH AND POOR. Ir so happened, that Isabella Morgan, a girl of fourteen, although one of three daughters, was at this time her father's sole companion; and, delighted at all seasons to be with him, her pleasure in his society was still enhanced by a little feeling of pride that she was now really useful; and that on her punctuality and skill depended the comfort of his tea and breakfast, and that papa would be quite lonely without her all the evening. So impressed was she with her own responsibility for his amusement, or so eager to share all her thoughts and fancies with this kind and cheerful father, that he had seldom laid aside his pen or book for half a minute, before she would begin the recital of some morning's adventure, or open upon some astonishing subject with Papa, I wonder whether . . . . !" or, Papa, don't you wonder why....?" But her doubts and embarrassments were seldom very important or perplexing: the wonderment was spoken the moment it arose in her mind, and, if capable of any rational solution at all, was soon quieted by her father's sagacious replies. Not so on this present evening: daylight had faded away, though candles and tea-time had not arrived. Mr. Morgan laid aside his pen, and drew near the small summer fire by which his daughter was seated on a low footstool, expecting from her some merry remark or grave surmise, as an introduction to their usual chat; but she seemed really considering some great matter, as a full minute passed, and yet she spoke not. 66 Mr. Morgan therefore roused her by begging, when her reverie was over, that he might be favoured with knowing what opinion she had formed of men and manners. "I was thinking of men, papa," she replied; "that is, of women, which is all the same, I suppose; and of their manners, too, or something more than manners. It has puzzled me very often lately; and I have tried not to think about it: but I went to Susan Parker's to-day, and talked to her and her sister, and it came to me again stronger than ever-I must tell you, and hear what you say about it;-but it is something so strange, it seems almost wicked:- Do you know, papa, I can't help thinking that the rich people are better than the poor?" Mr. Morgan had had a harassing day of business; he had just finished all the unpleasant letters which he was to send by to-morrow's post, and he knew he must devote two or three hours before bed-time to serinon |