of the world would be far less likely to obtain too powerful dominion. That which the world often terms romance, she felt to be a high, pure sense of poetry in the Universe and in Man, which she was quite as anxious to instill as many mothers to root out. She did not believe that to cultivate the spiritual needed the banishment of the matter of fact; but she believed, that to infuse the latter with the former would be their best and surest preventive against all that was low and mean; their best help in the realization of a constant unfailing piety. For the same reason she cultivated a taste for the beautiful, not only in her girls, but in her boys—and beauty, not in arts and nature alone, but in character. She did not allude to beauty of merely the high and striking kind, but to the lowly virtues, struggles, faith, and heroism in the poor—their forbearance and kindness to one another—marking something to admire, even in the most rugged and surly, that at first sight would seem so little worthy of notice. It was gradually, and almost unconsciously, to accustom her daughters to such a train of thought and sentiment, that she so particularly laid aside one part of the day to have them with her alone; ostensibly, it was to give part of their day to working for the many poor, to whom gifts of ready-made clothing are sometimes much more valuable than money; but the education of that one hour she knew might, for the right cultivation of the heart, do more than the mere teaching of five or six, and that education, much as she loved and valued Miss Harcourt, she had from the first resolved should come from her alone.

To Emmeline this mode of life was so happy, she could not imagine any thing happier. But Caroline often and often envied her great friend Annie Grahame, and believed that occasional visits to London would make her much happier than remaining all the year round at Oakwood, and only with her own family. She knew the expression of such sentiments would meet no sympathy at home, and certainly not obtain their gratification, so she tried to check them, except when in company with Annie and Lady Helen; but her mother knew them, and, from the discontent and unhappiness they so often engendered in her child, caused her both pain and uneasiness. But she did not waver in her plans, because only in Emmeline they seemed to succeed: nor did she, as perhaps some over-scrupulous mothers would have done, check Caroline's association with Miss Grahame. She