ually so fascinating and convivial.

"I used to take my book, which was generally some wild, impassioned
romance, and wandering to the ramparts, seat myself by the shining
pyramids of cannon-balls; and while the blue waves of the Chesapeake
rolled in murmuring music by, or, lashed by the ocean wind, heaved in
foaming billows, roaring against the walls, I yielded myself to the
wizard spell of genius and passion. The officers as they passed would
try to break the enchantment by gay and sportive words, but all in vain.
I have sat there, drenched by the salt sea-spray, and knew it not. I was
called the little bookworm, the prodigy, the _dream-girl_, a name you
have inherited, my darling Gabriella; and my father seemed proud of the
reputation I had established. But while my imagination was
preternaturally developed, my heart was slumbering, and my soul
unconscious of life's great aim.

"Thus unguarded by precept, unguided by example, I was sent from home to
a boarding-school, where I acquired the usual education and
accomplishments obtained at fashionable female seminaries. During my
absence from home, my two step-sisters, who were thought too young to
accompany me, and my infant step-brother, died in the space of one week,
smitten by that destroying angel of childhood, the scarlet fever.

"I had been at school two years when I made my first visit home. My
step-mother was then in the weeds of mourning, and of course excluded
herself in a measure from gay society; but I marvelled that sorrow had
not impaired the bloom of her cheek, or quenched the sparkle of her
cold, bright eye. Her heart was not buried in the grave of her
children,--it belonged to the world, to which she panted to return.

"But my father mourned. There was a shadow on his manly brow, which I
had never seen before. I was, now, his only child, the representative of
his once beloved Rosalie, and the pure, fond love of his early years
revived again in me. I look back upon those two months, when I basked in
the sunshine of parental tenderness for the first, the _only_ time, as a
portion of my life most dear and holy. I sighed when I thought of the
years when we had been comparatively so far apart, and my heart grew to
his with tender adhesiveness and growing love. The affections, which my
worldly step-mother had chilled and repressed, and which the death of
his other children had blighted, were now all mine, renovated and
warmed.

"Oh, Gabriella! very preci