te into downright, temporal love-making,
that she held them in as small reverence as the rest of their sex.
Only one dreadful John the Baptist of her acquaintance, one of
the camel's-hair-girdle and locust-and-wild-honey species, once
encountering Lillie at Saratoga, and observing the ways and manners
of the court which she kept there, took it upon him to give her a
spiritual admonition.

"Miss Lillie," he said, "I see no chance for the salvation of your
soul, unless it should please God to send the small-pox upon you. I
think I shall pray for that."

"Oh, horrors! don't! I'd rather never be saved," Lillie answered with
a fervent sincerity.

The story was repeated afterwards as an amusing _bon mot_, and a
specimen of the barbarity to which religious fanaticism may lead; and
yet we question whether John the Baptist had not the right of it.

For it must at once appear, that, had the small-pox made the
above-mentioned change in Lillie's complexion at sixteen, the entire
course of her life would have taken another turn. The whole world
then would have united in letting her know that she must live to some
useful purpose, or be nobody and nothing. Schoolmasters would have
scolded her if she idled over her lessons; and her breaking down
in arithmetic, and mistakes in history, would no longer have been
regarded as interesting. Clergymen, consulted on her spiritual state,
would have told her freely that she was a miserable sinner, who,
except she repented, must likewise perish. In short, all those bitter
and wholesome truths, which strengthen and invigorate the virtues
of plain people, might possibly have led her a long way on towards
saintship.

As it was, little Lillie was confessedly no saint; and yet, if much
of a sinner, society has as much to answer for as she. She was the
daughter and flower of the Christian civilization of the nineteenth
century, and the land of woman, that, on the whole, men of quite
distinguished sense have been fond of choosing for wives, and will go
on seeking to the end of the chapter.

Did she love John? Well, she was quite pleased to be loved by him, and
she liked the prospect of being his wife. She was sure he would always
let her have her own way, and that he had a plenty of worldly means to
do it with.

Lillie, if not very clever in a literary or scientific point of view,
was no fool. She had, in fact, under all her softness of manner, a
great deal of that real hard grit which shrewd,