entertained such feelings towards them, than the common, and to me ever absurd, explanation of envy; ay, even though some specimens of the nobler sex, ignorant enough themselves to make it credible, may have shrugged their silly shoulders, and generously pleaded guilty to the charge for the whole fraternity.

However, the kind of cleverness which Lady Alicia possessed did not lead her into exactly either of those extremes. It was not brilliant enough for the one, and it was too gentle for the other; but its fate was not to herself much better. She married Mr. Evelyn, as many others had done his ancestors, in the hope of leading him into fashionable life; but when she found the family failing incurably strong in him, she gave up the point, determining within herself, that since he would not associate with her friends, she would not with his; and accordingly, under the plea of delicate health, she confined herself by degrees almost entirely to her own apartments, and in sullen disappointment

broke off nearly all correspondence even with

her own family.

This, to a person gifted with talents, and situated in the country as she was, might all have been very well, had she ever been taught to turn those talents to good account; or had she even been taught the necessity of keeping them in control of any kind, in order that they might not turn upon and rend her. But she had not been taught this; and the consequence was, that fancy and imagination, left to their own devices, soon made out food for themselves on the subject of her health, and she became a confirmed valetudinarian. The successive births of two lovely children, a boy and a girl, for a time diverted her attention from this fatal subject; and she even undertook, as the children advanced from infancy to childhood, to be their instructress. But this could not continue long: both the children, as will sometimes happen, inherited all their mother's talents, and the boy a thousand times more. Although nearly a year

younger than his sister, he very soon proved that he required a better and more profound teacher than his lady mother.

The first symptoms that this discovery was mutual, were his visits to the dressing-room being suffered to become much fewer and shorter than heretofore; and at length Lady Alicia yielded to the truth of an opinion latterly frequently expressed by her husband in these words," My dear, I think it is time I should be looking out for a tutor for that boy:" and a tutor was accordingly procured.

Most providentially, the wisest and fondest parents could not have selected one more desirable in every respect than the individual whom accident threw in the way of these very incompetent and heedless judges. Mr. Mason was at once a profoundly learned, and a most conscientious man.

Although long habits of seclusion in the haunts of a college, joined to a peculiar simplicity of character, had left him as ignorant

of the ways of the world, (the modern world, as he termed it,) as an infant, they had rendered him, perhaps, but the more earnest in the duties he had undertaken to perform. He poured into the delighted ears of his intelligent pupil, not only the erudition of the schools, but liberal, high-minded, and extended principles of right and wrong—such as, falling upon congenial soil, seemed calculated to make the promising youth, in time, a good as well as a great man. They became almost immediately attached to each other in no common degree. The Christian simplicity of the good old man's character, though it never amounted to the ludicrous, was yet sufficient to make him conscious and reserved in the society of strangers; and because he felt that his own philosophic and high sentiments would not be understood by them, and yet knew no others with which to replace them, he generally remained perfectly silent, and by many was considered stupid, if not ignorant. How delightful was it, then, for him to find, in

the lovely child now committed to his care, one who could not only tolerate his noble peculiarities, but into whom it was at once his duty and delight to instil all his own high aspirings, after the only valuable knowledge,—namely, moral good in its most extended sense!

Of women, Mr. Mason was particularly shy; not from contempt or dislike, but simply because all he had ever read or heard of them, added to his own experience, (which consisted almost wholly in their exclusion from all seats of learning,) caused him to believe that they could have no feeling in common with him; and if, in his younger days, he had ever entertained other hopes, they were so long gone by, that he felt now as much apart from women, as if they were another order of beings. Indeed, he scarcely expected to be able to make himself intelligible to them, even in the common civilities of the table, and was therefore most agreeably surprised to find Mr. Evelyn's house nearly exempt from their presence; as, by the