d throughout Virginia,
crowning every knoll and giving character to every landscape. Before
the house stretched a green lawn bounded by a low fence; and in the
rear a garden full of flowers and blossoming fruit trees made the
surrounding air faint with the odorous breath of Spring.

Over the old house, whose dormer windows were wreathed with the mosses
of age, stretched the wide arms of two noble elms; and the whole
homestead had about it an air of home comfort, and a quiet, happy
repose, which made many a wayfarer from far countries sigh, as he
gazed on it, embowered in its verdurous grove.

In the garden is an arbor, over which flowering vines of every
description hover and bloom, full of the wine of spring. Around the
arbor extend flower plats carefully tended and fragrant with violets,
crocuses, and early primroses. Foliage of the light tender tint of May
clothes the background, and looking from the arbor you clearly discern
the distant barn rising above the trees.

In this arbor sits or rather reclines a young girl--for she has
stretched herself upon the trellised seat, with a languid and careless
ease, which betrays total abandon--an abandon engendered probably by
the warm languid air of May, and those million flowers burdening the
air with perfume.

This is Miss Belle-bouche, whom we have heard the melancholy Jacques
discourse of with such forlorn eloquence to his friend Tom, or Sir
Asinus, as the reader pleases.

Belle-bouche, Pretty-mouth, Belinda, or Rebecca--for this last was the
name given her by her sponsors--is a young girl of about seventeen,
and of a beauty so fresh and rare that the enthusiasm of Jacques was
scarcely strange. The girl has about her the freshness and innocence
of childhood, the grace and elegance of the inhabitants of that realm
of fairies which we read of in the olden poets--all the warmth, and
reality, and beauty of those lovelier fairies of our earth. Around her
delicate brow and rosy cheeks fall myriads of golden "drop curls,"
which veil the deep-blue eyes, half closed and fixed upon the open
volume in her hand. Belle-bouche is very richly clad, in a velvet
gown, a satin underskirt from which the gown is looped back, wide
cuffs and profuse lace at wrists and neck; and on her diminutive feet,
which peep from the skirt, are red morocco shoes tied with bows of
ribbon, and adorned with heels not more than three inches in height.
Her hair is powdered and woven with pearls--she wears