clared, that in the choice of a wife he would never
sacrifice his happiness to acquire it.

"I have enough of my own," he would say; "and when I meet the woman that
my heart chooses, whether she has fortune or not, that's the girl that I
will bring to share it, if she can love me."

Felix and his sister both, resided together; for after his father's
death he succeeded to the inheritance that had been designed for him.
Maura O'Donnell was in that state of life in which we feel it extremely
difficult to determine whether a female is hopeless or not upon the
subject of marriage. Her humors had begun to ferment and to clear off
into that thin vinegar serum which engenders the exquisite perception of
human error, and the equally keen touch with which it is reproved. Time,
in fact, had begun to crimp her face, and the vinegar to sparkle in her
eye with that fiery gleam which is so easily lit up at five and thirty.
Still she loved Felix, whose good-humor constituted him a butt for the
irascible sallies of a temper more nearly allied to his brother Hugh's
than his own. He was her younger brother, too, of whom she was justly
proud; and she knew that Felix, in spite of the pungency of her frequent
reproofs, loved her deeply, as was evident by the many instances of his
considerate attention in bringing her home presents of dress, and in
contributing, as far as lay in his power, to her comfort.

The world, indeed, is too much in the habit of drawing distorted
inferences from the transient feuds that occasionally appear in domestic
life. It would be hard to find a family in which they do not sometimes
occur; and when noticed by strangers, it is both uncharitable and unjust
to conclude that there is an absence of domestic affection in the hearts
of those who, after all, prove no more than that they are subject to
the errors and passions of human nature, like their fellow creatures.
No sister, for instance, ever loved another with stronger affection than
poor Maura did her brother Felix, notwithstanding the repeated scoldings
which, for very trivial causes, he experienced at her tongue. Woe,
keen and scathing, be to those who dared, in her presence to utter an
insinuation against him.

"If she abused him, she only did it for his good, and because she loved
him; an' good right she had to love him, for a better brother never
breathed the breath of life. Wasn't he a mere boy, only one-and-twenty
years come next Lammas; and surely it s