ervation now, and, for a time at least, lay aside the spectacles
with which authors would furnish us."

In a postscript she adds:--

"Will you be kind enough to inform me of the number of performers in
the King's military band?"

And in something of the same strain she writes on

"June 19th.
"My own Dear E.,

"I may rightfully and truly call you so now. You _have_ returned or
_are_ returning from London--from the great city which is to me as
apocryphal as Babylon, or Nineveh, or ancient Rome. You are
withdrawing from the world (as it is called), and bringing with you--if
your letters enable me to form a correct judgment--a heart as
unsophisticated, as natural, as true, as that you carried there. I am
slow, _very_ slow, to believe the protestations of another; I know my
own sentiments, I can read my own mind, but the minds of the rest of
man and woman kind are to me sealed volumes, hieroglyphical scrolls,
which I cannot easily either unseal or decipher. Yet time, careful
study, long acquaintance, overcome most difficulties; and, in your
case, I think they have succeeded well in bringing to light and
construing that hidden language, whose turnings, windings,
inconsistencies, and obscurities, so frequently baffle the researches
of the honest observer of human nature . . . I am truly grateful for
your mindfulness of so obscure a person as myself, and I hope the
pleasure is not altogether selfish; I trust it is partly derived from
the consciousness that my friend's character is of a higher, a more
steadfast order than I was once perfectly aware of. Few girls would
have done as you have done--would have beheld the glare, and glitter,
and dazzling display of London with dispositions so unchanged, heart
so uncontaminated. I see no affectation in your letters, no trifling,
no frivolous contempt of plain, and weak admiration of showy persons
and things."

In these days of cheap railway trips, we may smile at the idea of a short
visit to London having any great effect upon the character, whatever it
may have upon the intellect. But her London--her great apocryphal
city--was the "town" of a century before, to which giddy daughters
dragged unwilling papas, or went with injudicious friends, to the
detriment of all their better qualities, and sometimes to the ruin of
their fortunes; it was the Vanity Fair of the "Pilgrim's Progress" to