At the moment she perceived Manuel Nevarro crossing the Plaza, and drawing closer the mantilla, she hastened homeward.

CHAPTER IX.

  “A perfect woman, nobly planned;
  To warn, to counsel, to command,
  The reason firm, the temperate will,
  Prudence, foresight, strength, and skill.”

  Wordsworth.

The beautiful ideal of Wordsworth seemed realized in Mrs. Carlton.  She was by nature impetuous, and even irritable; but the careful training of her deeply pious mother early eradicated these seeds of discord and future misery.  She reared her “in the way she should go,” and taught her to “remember her Creator in the days of her youth.”  Crushing vanity, which soon rose hydra-headed in her path, she implanted in her daughter’s heart a sense of her own unworthiness, and led her to the “fountain of light and strength.”

Under her judicious care, Ellen’s character was molded into perfect beauty.  She became a Christian, in the purest sense of the term.  Hers were not the gloomy tenets of the anchorite, which, with a sort of Spartan stoicism, severs every tie enjoined by his great Creator, bids adieu to all of joy that earth can give, and becomes a devotee at the shrine of some canonized son of earth, as full of imperfections as himself.  Neither did she hold the lighter and equally dangerous creed of the latitudinarian.  Her views were of a happy medium; liberal, yet perfectly orthodox.

Ellen married early in life, and many were the trials which rose up to test her fortitude, and even her reliance on almighty God.  Of six beautiful children that blessed her union, four went down to an early tomb.  Though bowed to the earth by the weight of her affliction, she murmured not against the hand that chastened her; but as one by one was snatched from her warm embrace, she poured out the depth of a mother’s love on the remaining two.

One stroke of fortune reduced her, in a day, from affluence to comparative penury; and leaving his luxurious home, Mr. Carlton resolved to seek his fortune in the Western World.  Hither she had accompanied him, encountering, without a murmur, the numerous hardships, which those who have not endured can never fully realize.  They had preceded Mr. Hamilton but a few months, and joyfully welcomed him as an agreeable acquisition to their little circle.

Mrs. Carlton found in Mary a real friend; one who sympathized with, and assisted her in her many benevolent plans for ameliorating the condition of the destitute Mexicans around them.

With Florence, the former had little affinity, and, consequently, little intercourse.  Their tastes were directly opposite, and though they often met, there was no interchange of the deep and holier feelings of the heart.