neighbors, of
course, but none of them could tell how they contrived to subsist. The
mother did no work, except for herself and her child; she had but a
small garden in front of the house, the embellishment of which was her
particular care; and she was surrounded with books, in the reading of
which she spent all her leisure time, having little intercourse with her
neighbors. The gossips that exist everywhere in society, if curious
about her affairs, could discover nothing as to how she lived so
comfortably without any visible means.

When the daughter, Sabrina, grew up to sixteen, her beauty, the
character she developed, and her general conduct were the topic of quite
as much rural conversation and remark as had been the mystery that hung
around the mother. Gradually drawn out into the neighboring society, her
great personal attractions, added to her shrewdness and good sense, made
her so much admired as to collect around her a train of suitors, who
seemed to consider her being fatherless as of no more consequence to
them than it was to herself.

But there was in her temperament an undercurrent of ambition so strong
as to cause her to receive their advances toward tender acquaintance
with a freezing coldness, while at the same time it rendered her
positively unhappy. She felt superior to her condition, and she longed
to rise above it. Her mind had attained to a premature development while
feeding almost exclusively on its own thoughts,--for she had never been
fond of books, though there were many around her. Her sole occupations
had been the school, the needle, and assisting her mother in the
management of their flower-garden. For this last she had a decided
taste, and they had concealed the time-worn character of the old house
they occupied by covering it with a luxuriance of floral wealth, so
tastefully arranged, and so profuse and gorgeous, that travellers on the
dusty highway on which it stood would stop to admire the remarkable
blending of the climbing rose, the honeysuckle, and the grape.

Thus filled with indefinite longings, she grew up to womanhood without
any proper direction from her mother. She had no sympathy with her
uncultivated suitors. She sighed for something higher, an ideal that was
far off, indistinct, and dim. Good offers of marriage from neighboring
workmen of fair character and prospects she stubbornly declined,
sometimes with a tartness that quite confounded the swain whom her
well-known char