her parents; and, when young Stapleton proved his unexceptionable claims to her hand, and succeeded in gaining the first place in her heart, she experienced no shadow of anxiety on the subject of their future happiness. Her fortune she knew entitled her to expect as good a match as she had met with. She was sufficiently conscious of her personal attractions, to rest free from the dread of mere fortune-hunting lovers. A liberal income, a handsome establishment, with perfect freedom in the regulation of her household, to which, in course of time, were added two sons and a daughter, left her no time for ennui, no subject for discontent. One unvaried state of perfect health and placid happiness pervaded her whole family; and the only period she could recall to her mind as not being one of unmixed enjoyment, was that during which Fanny suffered under the infantine disease of measles. This had passed off happily; Fanny was now seventeen, the pride of both parents, the delight of her brothers. Her education had been pursued with as much intensity of purpose as came within the bounds of her indulgent mother to tolerate; and with all that mother's beauty revived, she had the same placidity of temper, and, perhaps, no greater expanse of intellect than that

C

caused by the march of mind and manners, in the lapse of years, had produced in the process of education.

To come out, be admired, to marry, were the three leading expectations of Fanny Stapleton ; and she awaited the period at which they should severally be achieved, as a matter of course, and quite independent of any care or exertion on her part.

Fanny had no acquaintance in fashionable life. Novel reading she had no taste for; and it had never occurred to her to listen to the schemes, or witness the manœuvres, of the pitiable mother of many portionless girls in her industrious attempts to dispose of them at almost any price. She had never happened to hear that "every thing depended on getting into the first circles;" nor had she any conception of the innumerable acts of meanness to which the unfortunate mother would lend herself in so indispensable a measure. She was never told that "all her attention ought to be devoted to the attitudes and graces cultivated by her dancing-master;" that "dancing and carriage were the primary considerations of every young woman who expected to get off." Neither had she been taught the vital importance, as it is in the highest circles

6

pronounced to be, of the circumspection to be used respecting a first appearance, by which means the desirable result of an engagement during the first season might be secured. Nay, she did not even know, for she had seldom been out of the city, that, above all other things, she ought to dread a failure of marriage within three seasons; with the disgraceful alternative of hiding her misfortunes in retirement at the countryhouse, to allow her young sisters to come forward, and with only the forlorn hope of establishing herself in the heart of the village curate or apothecary.

Fanny was ignorant that, by the supreme laws of fashion, a triennial eclipse must be performed on some pretext or other; and it would have startled her to hear that, in some solitary instances, where the novice did not entirely lose the appearance and bloom of youth, she retrograded from the ball-room to the school-room, there to undergo a second course of polishing and torment under the dominion of some vinegar-visaged French governess, and to await the more successful exertions of her second sister, whose marriage would prove the signal for her liberation, and another campaign would be entered upon under the title of the third Miss

The anxious mother, writhing beneath the dread of detection, and suspecting the sincerity of the congratulations poured in her ear on the unexampled success of having cleared off two daughters within three seasons. In cases of this nature there are instances where ill-natured dowagers and tenacious danglers terrify the trembling mama, by persisting to exclaim and wonder at the amazing likeness between the new Miss and her eldest sister. They will even sometimes be impertinent enough to profess a lapse of memory as to whether the eldest Miss settled in the country, or went out to India. To these troublesome querists, nothing more decisive can be urged than the oft repeated subterfuge, family likeness; and deeply, indeed, is that martyred mother to be pitied, who sees her assertions on this subject received with a credulous smile.

But Fanny Stapleton, happy girl! was the only daughter of a man of character and wealth. I doubt if it would even have added to her happiness to know how enviable an object she appeared in the eyes of the interminable strings of Ladies Jane, Georgiana, and Julia, and Honourable misses, whose poverty had been perpetually held up to them as a spur in the attainment of the most taking accomplishment; and who as soon

would have dared to jump into a river as to smile on any man of less than a clear ten thousand per annum. The matron's eye, they were

conscious was never for a moment removed from them during the dance, or the supposed flirtation to follow. They could not plead ignorance in justification of carelessness; for if it so chanced that, dearth of men, or some untoward circumstance consigned them to an ineligible partner, the mother failed not, while accepting the scarf and fan of her daughter, to whisper, "Remember, no nonsense, he's nothing but a younger son, and has not a penny." Woe be to her who, after such a warning, presumed to maintain any other than a monosyllabic conversation with her unworthy companion; and direfully would the morning lecture peal in her weary ears after the commission of so heinous a sin.

In utter carelessness and unconsciousness of the "ways and means" so deeply studied by her competitors, for getting a husband, Fanny Stapleton contemplated, that is, when she gave herself the trouble of thinking about the matter, that she would avoid any thing like a serious engagement for the first few years of her entrance on the world; since it would be a pity, she said to herself, to settle down into a sober married