and one meets her in the morning, the very
image of bright morn itself, smiling briskly at you, so that one takes
her for a promise of cheerfulness through the day. Be it said, with all
the rest, that there is a perfect maiden modesty in her deportment. She
has just gone away, and the last I saw of her was her vivacious face
peeping through the curtain of the cariole, and nodding a gay farewell
to the family, who were shouting their adieux at the door. With her
other merits, she is an excellent daughter, and supports her mother by
the labor of her hands. It would be difficult to conceive beforehand how
much can be added to the enjoyment of a household by mere sunniness of
temper and liveliness of disposition; for her intellect is very
ordinary, and she never says anything worth hearing, or even laughing
at, in itself. But she herself is an expression well worth studying.

THE FENIAN "IDEA."

It was a great truth Shelley uttered when he said that slavery would not
be the enormous wrong and evil which it is, if men who had long suffered
under it could rise at once to freedom and self-government. We see this
fact everywhere proved by races, nations, sexes, long held in bondage,
and, when at last set free, displaying for years, perhaps for
generations, the vices of cowardice, deceit, and cruelty engendered by
slavery. Chains leave ugly scars on the flesh, but deeper scars by far
on the soul. Even where the exercise of oppression has stopped short of
actual serfdom,--where a race has been merely excluded from some natural
rights, and burdened with some unrighteous restrictions,--the same
result, in a mitigated degree, may be traced in moral degradation,
surviving the injustice itself and almost its very memory. Ages pass
away, and "Revenge and Wrong" still "bring forth their kind." The evil
is not dead, though they who wrought it have long mouldered in their
forgotten graves.

In a very remarkable manner this sad law of our nature applies to the
condition of the Irish race. Doubtless the isolated position of Ireland,
the small share it has had in the life and movement of our century, has
allowed the old wrongs to fester in memory, and the old feelings of
rancor to perpetuate themselves, as they could never have done in a
country more in the highway of nations. Vendettas personal and political
are ever to be found in islands, like Corsica, Sicily, Ireland; or in
remote glens and mountains, such as those of Scotland