CHAPTER XVI.

Time passed on; I had almost reached my fifteenth birthday, and began to consider myself no longer a child.  I was very tall for my age, and quite showy-looking; and gentlemen who visited at the house now treated me with all the attention due a young lady; which flattered my vanity very much, and made me think them very agreeable.  I remember my father’s once sending me from the room, on account of some gentleman’s nonsense which he considered me too young to listen to; but I felt very much hurt at such treatment, and almost regarded myself as some heroine of romance imprisoned by cruel parents.  Novels were a great injury to me, as indeed they are to every one.  Their style was much more extravagant and unnatural than at the present day; and even at this early age, I had read the “Children of the Abbey,” the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” the “Scottish Chiefs,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” and many others of the same stamp.

But how did I obtain these, you ask?  My mother, with her sense and discernment, would not have placed such books in my hands; and you are right.  My grandmother was an inveterate novel-reader, but very careful that her books fell into no other hands; so that the only means of satisfying my taste for romantic reading was by stealth.  Although novels were proscribed, no other books were placed in my hands; there were then scarcely any children’s books published, and consumed as I was by an inordinate passion for reading, was determined to indulge it without being very particular about the means.  How often have I watched my opportunity when my grandmother had left her apartment for an afternoon visit or drive, and then drawn forth the cherished volume from beneath the pillow and even from between the bed and sacking bottom! so carefully were they concealed from view.  Sometimes, indeed, she locked the door of her room, and took the key with her; and then all ingress was impossible.

What wild, foolish dreams I indulged in!—­What romantic-visions of the future that were never realized!  How well I remember my sensations on reading the “Scottish Chiefs.”  Wallace appeared to me almost in the light of a god—­so noble, so touching were all his acts and words, that I even envied Helen Mar the privilege of calling herself his wife, and then dying to lay her head in the same grave with him.  I resolved to give up all the common-place of life, and cling unto the spiritual—­to purify myself from every earth-born wish and habit, and live but in the hope of meeting with a second Wallace.  I persevered in this resolution for a whole week; and then meeting with some equally delightful hero of an opposite nature, I changed from grave to gay.  My mood during these periods of fascination was as variable as the different heroines I admired.  Now I would imitate the pensiveness of Amanda, and go about with streaming tresses, and a softly modulated tone of voice—­then I would read of some