is
now on the straight road to bring him into that situation most likely
to engage the warm partisanship of a true woman,--namely, that of a man
unjustly abused for right-doing,--and one may see that it is ten to one
our Mary may fall in love with him yet, before she knows it.

If it were not for this mysterious selfness-and-sameness which makes
this wild, wandering, uncanonical sailor, James Marvyn, so intimate
and internal,--if his thread were not knit up with the thread of her
life,--were it not for the old habit of feeling for him, thinking for
him, praying for him, hoping for him, fearing for him, which--woe is
us!--is the unfortunate habit of womankind,--if it were not for that
fatal something which neither judgment, nor wishes, nor reason, nor
common sense shows any great skill in unravelling,--we are quite sure
that Mary would be in love with the Doctor within the next six
months; as it is, we leave you all to infer from your own heart and
consciousness what his chances are.

A new sort of scene is about to open on our heroine, and we shall show
her to you, for an evening at least, in new associations, and with a
different background from that homely and rural one in which she has
fluttered as a white dove amid leafy and congenial surroundings.

As we have before intimated, Newport presented a _resume_ of many
different phases of society, all brought upon a social level by the then
universally admitted principle of equality.

There were scattered about in the settlement lordly mansions, whose
owners rolled in emblazoned carriages, and whose wide halls were the
scenes of a showy and almost princely hospitality. By her husband's
side, Mrs. Katy Scudder was allied to one of these families of wealthy
planters, and often recognized the connection with a quiet undertone
of satisfaction, as a dignified and self-respecting woman should. She
liked, once in a while, quietly to let people know, that, although they
lived in the plain little cottage and made no pretensions, yet they had
good blood in their veins,--that Mr. Scudder's mother was a Wilcox, and
that the Wilcoxes were, she supposed, as high as anybody,--generally
ending the remark with the observation, that "all these things, to be
sure, were matters of small consequence, since at last it would be of
far more importance to have been a true Christian than to have been
connected with the highest families of the land."

Nevertheless, Mrs. Scudder was not a lit