her under that name.

When it became known among the boarders that two of their number
had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side,
there was, as you may suppose, no small sensation. I confess I
pitied our landlady. It took her all of a suddin,--she said. Had
not known that we was keepin company, and never mistrusted anything
particular. Ma'am was right to better herself. Didn't look very
rugged to take care of a femily, but could get hired haalp, she
calc'lated.--The great maternal instinct came crowding up in her
soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her
daughter.

--No, poor, dear woman,--that could not have been. But I am
dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile
on my face all the time.

The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out
of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of
oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific
cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as
that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump
and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick
performed. Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human
beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the
atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is
that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman
who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The
element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her
crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls;--her
bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle,
compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of
Martyrs." The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that
frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as
slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we
call Civilization!

Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain,
overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young
person, whoever you may be, now reading this,--little thinking you
are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are
destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such
multitudes worthier than yourself. But it is only my surface-
thought which laughs. For that great procession of the UNLOVED,
who not only wear the crown