, I should with some modifications train her after
this mellow old style."

"Then I am truly thankful she is not my sister! Fancy her pretty
pearly fingers encrusted with gingerbread-dough; or her entrance into
the library heralded by the perfume of moly, or of basil and sage,
tolerable only as the familiars of a dish of sausage meat! Don't soil
my dainty white dove with the dust and soot and rank odours that
belong to the culinary realm."

"Your white dove? Do you propose to adopt her? A month hence when you
are on your way to India, what difference can it possibly make to
you, whether she is as brown as a quail or black as a crow? Before
you come back, she will have been conscripted into the staid army of
matrons, and transmogrified into stout Mrs. Ptolemy Thomson, or lean
and careworn Mrs. Simon Smith, or worse than all, erudite Mrs.
Professor Belshazzar Brown, spelling Hercules after the learned
style, with the loss of the u, and the substitution of a k; or making
the ghost of Ulysses tear his hair, by writing the name of his
enchantress 'Kirke'!"

As Mrs. Lindsay spoke the smile vanished from her lips, and looking
keenly at her son's countenance she detected the change that crossed
it, the sudden glow that mounted to the edge of his hair.

Avoiding her eyes, he answered hastily: "Suppose those distinguished
gentlemen you mention chance to be scholars, _savans_, and disposed
to follow the advice of Joubert in making their matrimonial
selection: 'We should choose for a wife only the woman we should
choose for a friend, were she a man.' Think you mere habits of
domesticity, or skill in herbalism, would arrest and fix their
fancy?"

"But, Bishop, they might consider the Talmud more venerable authority
than Joubert, and the Talmud says, so I am told: 'Descend a step in
choosing a wife; mount a step in choosing a friend.'"

"Thank heaven! there is indeed no Salique Law in the realm of
learning. Mother, I believe one of the happiest auguries of the
future consists in the broadening views of education that are now
held by some of our ablest thinkers. If in the morning of our
religious system, St. Peter deemed it obligatory on us to be able and
'ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason
of the hope that is in you,' how doubly imperative is that duty in
this controversial age, when the popular formula has been adopted,
'to doubt, to inquire, to discover;' when the hammer of the geologist
p