objections to it as the daughter did. To say the truth, she had a large family, and looked upon her daughters as much in the light of traffic, as her barley meal. In short, won by a handsome sum, a promise of painting her picture in the attitude of milking a favourite cow, and a half anker of genuine nantz—with shame I write it—after but little hesitation, she agreed to

this method of providing for her girl as she called it.
This good woman, in her youth, had been tolerably handsome herself. Master Flush had been heard to intimate that he fancied the governor—meaning Standfast—had taken care to provide a birth in heaven for Master Swash, in the month of April; but I am afraid nobody had so strong a claim to that favour as Lord Hazard.
Charles had eyed this girl with pleasure, but would not for the universe have given way to the shadow of an impulse to her dishonour. And here it may not be amiss to beg the reader will stop with me, and admire how greatly to our own advantage we take resolutions which are in favour of virtue; for it is within possibility that, had our hero given way to an inclination natural enough for a youth of warm blood to entertain, and I hope full as natural if there were any thing like honour in his disposition, to conquer—hear it ye seducers of virtue! Ye merciless triumphant despoilers of innocence! who are cruel because you have power!—insolent because victorious!—hear it, and reflect with horror on the miseries that to often result from your vices,—he might have contaminated a sister!!

From so deplorable a crime, however unintentional, did Charles, by his perseverance in his honourable resolutions, very probably escape; for he, by his frequent chat with this girl, had taught her bosom to glow with tenderness, but having put the curb, as we have seen, upon his wishes, and ceased to be particular from the moment he was apprehensive of danger—during which interval the painter stept in—she found some pleasure, which the reader may be assured is not unnatural, in listening to language of the same kind from another, even though it was not so eloquently worded, or so gracefully delivered.
As Charles withdrew his attention from this girl upon a ground for which she loved him still more—for he made no scruple of confessing the truth—the poor girl having been repulsed by her mother, as we have seen, or rather encouraged to make her fortune, according to the old gentlewoman, by that which, according to any body else, would have been her ruin, was walking solitary