tances were distressingly easy. It
would have been so much nicer, so deliciously romantic, if there had been
an opportunity afforded me to show how ready, nay, eager, I was to
sacrifice friends, home and country for his dear sake. But Charlie didn't
want me to sacrifice my friends; nor did it require any great amount of
heroism to exchange my modestly comfortable home for his decidedly
luxurious one; and as for country, nothing on earth could have induced
Charlie to leave his own country, much less his own parish, much less his
own plantation. So we were married without any talk of sacrifice on either
side, and moved quietly enough from father's small plantation to Charlie's
large one.

There was but one drawback to the perfectness of my happiness: there was
so little hope of my ever having an opportunity to air those magnanimous
traits of character upon the possession of which I so plumed myself. I
felt sure that I could meet the most adverse circumstances with the most
smiling patience, but circumstances obstinately refused to be adverse. I
was inwardly conscious that the most trying emergency could not shake my
heroic but purely feminine fortitude; but, alas! my fortitude was likely
to rust while waiting for the emergency. Injury and wrong should be met
with sublime dignity, but the most wildly speculative imagination could
not look upon Charlie's placidly handsome face and convert him into a
possible tyrant.

To tell how the longed-for opportunity to exercise my powers of endurance,
and my dignity, and all the rest of it, did finally come about, and to
tell how I bore the test, is the object of this paper.

For the first six months of our married life, Charlie and I were simply
ridiculously happy--selfishly happy too. We resented a neighbor's visit as
an act of barbarous invasion, and the necessity of returning such visits
was acknowledged with a sublimity of resignation worthy of pictorial
representation in that exquisite parlor manual, Fox's _Book of Martyrs_.
If Charlie left the house for an hour or two, I looked upon his enforced
absence as a cruel dispensation of Providence, which I did _not_ bear with
"fortitude and sublime dignity," but pouted over like the ridiculous baby
I was. Bare conjugal civility required that on leaving the house Charlie
should kiss me three times, and on returning six times: anything short of
that I should have considered a pre-monitory symptom of approaching
separation. If Charlie