es.

CHAPTER III.

_THE SISTER_.

Grace Seymour was a specimen of a class of whom we are happy to say
New England possesses a great many.

She was a highly cultivated, intelligent, and refined woman, arrived
at the full age of mature womanhood unmarried, and with no present
thought or prospect of marriage. I presume all my readers, who are in
a position to run over the society of our rural New-England towns, can
recall to their minds hundreds of such. They are women too thoughtful,
too conscientious, too delicate, to marry for any thing but a purely
personal affection; and this affection, for various reasons, has not
fallen in their way.

The tendency of life in these towns is to throw the young men of the
place into distant fields of adventure and enterprise in the far
Western and Southern States, leaving at their old homes a population
in which the feminine element largely predominates. It is not,
generally speaking, the most cultivated or the most attractive of the
brethren who remain in the place where they were born. The ardent, the
daring, the enterprising, are off to the ends of the earth; and the
choice of the sisters who remain at home is, therefore, confined to a
restricted list; and so it ends in these delightful rose-gardens of
single women which abound in New England,--women who remain at home as
housekeepers to aged parents, and charming persons in society; women
over whose graces of conversation and manner the married men in their
vicinity go off into raptures of eulogium, which generally end with,
"Why hasn't that woman ever got married?"

It often happens to such women to expend on some brother that stock of
hero-worship and devotion which it has not come in their way to give
to a nearer friend. Alas! it is building on a sandy foundation; for,
just as the union of hearts is complete, the chemical affinity which
began in the cradle, and strengthens with every year of life, is
dissolved by the introduction of that third element which makes of
the brother a husband, while the new combination casts out the
old,--sometimes with a disagreeable effervescence.

John and Grace Seymour were two only children of a very affectionate
family; and they had grown up in the closest habits of intimacy. They
had written to each other those long letters in which thoughtful
people who live in retired situations delight; letters not of outward
events, but of sentiments and opinions, the phases of the inner l