merely animal pride, which is never quite apart from the pride of developed beauty.  They were as upright as Oriental girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to the well.  Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her Rachel.  They tossed one another their mutual compliments, drawn from the chief book of their reading.  Queen of Sheba was Dahlia’s title.  No master of callisthenics could have set them up better than their mother’s receipt for making good blood, combined with a certain harmony of their systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter speaking.  The characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves; nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia’s irony; and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret Prince Florizels.  Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London.  Naturally, the girls dreamed of London.  To educate themselves, they copied out whole pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,’ which was next to the family Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer’s small library.  The deeds of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy princes, were assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them upon millers’, farmers’, maltsters’, and tradesmen’s sons, the thought of what manner of youth would propose to marry them became a precocious tribulation.  Rhoda, at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing to her sister’s habit of masking her own dismal internal forebodings on the subject, under the guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad chance.

In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model.  There came once to Squire Blancove’s unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair lady.  They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow, Mrs. Lovell by name.  They looked at her all through the service, and the lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut her eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of herself, as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of grey-shot silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and the picture she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many ensuing years.