erished ere half their years were
numbered; and of the crowd that pressed onward, even to the farthest
verge of natural life, how few escape the too common lot of
wretchedness! The danger that most threatens you, in the
fast-approaching future, is that which threatens every young maiden.
Your happiness or misery hangs nicely poised, and if you have not a
wise discrimination, the scale may take a wrong preponderance. Alas!
if it should be so!"

Mr. Allison paused a moment, and then said:

"Shall I go on?"

"Oh, yes! Speak freely. I am listening to your words as if they came
from the lips of my own father."

"An error in marriage is one of life's saddest errors, said Mr.
Allison.

"I believe that," was the maiden's calm remark; yet Mr. Allison saw
that her eyes grew instantly brighter, and the hue of her cheeks
warmer.

"In a _true_ marriage, there must be good moral qualities. No
pure-minded woman can love a man for an instant after she discovers
that he is impure, selfish, and evil. It matters not how high his
rank, how brilliant his intellect, how attractive his exterior
person, how perfect his accomplishments. In her inmost spirit she
will shrink from him, and feel his presence as a sphere of
suffocation. Oh! can the thought imagine a sadder lot for a
true-hearted woman! And there is no way of escape. Her own hands
have wrought the chains that bind her in a most fearful bondage."

Again Mr. Allison paused, and regarded his young companion with a
look of intense interest.

"May heaven spare you from such a lot!" he said, in a low, subdued
voice.

Fanny made no reply. She sat with her eyes resting on the ground,
her lips slightly parted, and her cheeks of a paler hue.

"Can you see any truth in what I have been saying?" asked Mr.
Allison, breaking in upon a longer pause than he had meant should
follow his last remark.

"Oh, yes, yes; much truth. A new light seems to have broken suddenly
into my mind."

"Men bear about them a spiritual as well as a natural sphere of
their quality."

"If there is a spiritual form, there must be a spiritual quality,"
said Fanny, partly speaking to herself, as if seeking more fully to
grasp the truth she uttered.

"And spiritual senses, as well, by which qualities may be
perceived," added Mr. Allison.

"Yes,--yes." She still seemed lost in her own thoughts.

"As our bodily senses enable us to discern the quality of material
objects, and thus to appropriate what is g