“Gracie dear,” said Miss Ferguson, “this sort of thing will never do.  If you meet your brother in this way, you will throw him off, and, maybe, make a fatal breach.  Meet it like a good Christian, as you are.  You know,” she said gently, “where we have a right to carry our troubles, and of whom we should ask guidance.”

“Oh, I do know, ’Titia!” said Miss Grace; “but I am letting myself be wicked just a little, you know, to relieve my mind.  I ought to put myself to school to make the best of it; but it came on me so very suddenly.  Yes,” she added, “I am going to take a course of my Bible and Fenelon before I see John,—­poor fellow.”

“And try to have faith for her,” said Miss Letitia.

“Well, I’ll try to have faith,” said Miss Grace; “but I do trust it will be some days before John comes down on me with his raptures,—­men in love are such fools.”

“But, dear me!” said Miss Letitia, as her head accidentally turned towards the window; “who is this riding up?  Gracie, as sure as you live, it is John himself!”

“John himself!” repeated Miss Grace, becoming pale.

“Now do, dear, be careful,” said Miss Letitia.  “I’ll just run out this back door and leave you alone;” and just as Miss Letitia’s light heels were heard going down the back steps, John’s heavy footsteps were coming up the front ones.

CHAPTER III.

THE SISTER.

Grace Seymour was a specimen of a class of whom we are happy to say New England possesses a great many.

She was a highly cultivated, intelligent, and refined woman, arrived at the full age of mature womanhood unmarried, and with no present thought or prospect of marriage.  I presume all my readers, who are in a position to run over the society of our rural New-England towns, can recall to their minds hundreds of such.  They are women too thoughtful, too conscientious, too delicate, to marry for any thing but a purely personal affection; and this affection, for various reasons, has not fallen in their way.

The tendency of life in these towns is to throw the young men of the place into distant fields of adventure and enterprise in the far Western and Southern States, leaving at their old homes a population in which the feminine element largely predominates.  It is not, generally speaking, the most cultivated or the most attractive of the brethren who remain in the place where they were born.  The ardent, the daring, the enterprising, are off to the ends of the earth; and the choice of the sisters who remain at home is, therefore, confined to a restricted list; and so it ends in these delightful rose-gardens of single women which abound in New England,—­women who remain at home as housekeepers to aged parents, and charming persons in society; women over whose graces of conversation and manner the married men in their vicinity go off into raptures of eulogium, which generally end with, “Why hasn’t that woman ever got married?”