She has such a delicious voice.

'And while I am on tiresome people, who think only of themselves, let me recall P. George Rawdon; the Raven, Bertha; I always believed his first name was Pluto, because of the shades around him. They say every one has a text book; his was neither the Bible, the Prayer Book, Thomas à Kempis, La Nouvelle Héloise, or 'Queechy,' but Mrs. Crowe's 'Night Side of Nature.' Talk of having a skeleton in the house! the most distressing ones that ever preceded Douglas and Sherwood's were nothing to him! he reminded one constantly of an Egyptian feast. He looked sadly at children, and gave little Henry Parsons, his godchild, a miniature dagger with a jewelled handle, with which the child nearly destroyed his right hand. When poor Mary was married, he walked mournfully up to the altar, and stared during the ceremony unmistakably at an imaginary coffin, hanging, like Mohammed's, midway between the ceiling and the floor. Poor man, it's really curious, but he contrives to be always in mourning, and everybody knows that he goes only to see tragedies, and has the dyspepsia, like Regina and her diamond cross, from principle. He composes epitaphs for all the ladies of his acquaintance, and presents them, like newspaper-carrier addresses, on New Year's days. I have one in my writing desk in a very secret drawer; a soul-cheering effusion, but not particularly agreeable to the physical humanity. This I intend to bequeath to the British museum, where it will be in future ages as great a treat to the antiquary as the Elgin marbles. What a doleful subject—pass him by!'

'Don't forget Leon Channing,' suggested Fanny, who was listening with great interest, and from a natural dread of ghosts and vampires was glad to see that Mr. Rawdon had come to a crisis.

'Dear me, no!' said Henrietta, cheerily, 'it's quite refreshing to come to an individual who creates a smile. I never was born for tears and lamentations, Bertha, any more than a lily was made to be merry; and if it were not for Len Channing, I don't suppose I should ever have been sharpened to such a dangerous degree; it's this constant friction, you know; well, as some darling of a cosmopolite has said, 'We must allow for friction in the most perfect machinery—yes, be glad to find it—for a certain degree of resistance is essential to strength. I like Leon very well. No one is more safe in a parlor engagement, always in the right place at the right tune, never embarrassed, never de trop; but then the queer consciousness, when he's giving you a meringué or an ice, that if you were a 'real pretty,' graceful, conversible fawn or dove he would be doing it with the same interest! Why? Oh, because he says women belong to a lower order in the animal creation! Yes, veil your face, Mr. Lenox Raleigh, and be mournful that you are a man! 'A lower order of humanity!' Well, of course, I'm always quarrelling with him. To be sure he's a shallow kind of a philosopher, one of your rationalists; thinks Boston is the linchpin of the whole universe; has autograph letters from Emerson and Longfellow, and all that sort of thing. Now, I dare say it's very fine for a Schelling or a Hegel once in a while to beam over the earth, but it always seems inharmonious to me to see little jets of philosophers popping up in your face and then down again, all the time, thinking themselves great things. That's the way with Leon. Let me tell you what happened when I saw him last; and that was in Cologne, more than a year ago. I was sitting in our room with a great folio of Retzsch's engravings before me, and father writing horrible notes in his journal at the table, and wishing the eleven thousand virgins and all Cologne in the bottom of the Rhine, when I looked up, and somehow there was Leon. Of course we were rejoiced to see him, it's always so pleasant to meet friends abroad. After some talk, father went out to take another look at the cathedral, and indulge in speculations and legends, and left Leon and me in the window. It's as queer and horrible an old town, girls, as you ever dreamed of, and, as there was nothing external very fascinating, Leon soon turned his gaze inward, and, after twanging several minor strings, began to harp on his endless 'inferiority of woman.' I plied him, you may know; I gave him Zenobias and Didos and de Staels and de Medicis—in an emergency Pope Joan, and finally the Boston Margaret Fuller. Leon only stroked his beard and smiled.

''Miss Henrietta,' said he, at last, when I stopped in exultation, 'do you grant the Africans the vigor or variety of intellect of the Europeans?'

''No,' said I.

''Yet you concede that there may be instances among them, where education and culture have developed great results.'

''Yes,' I thought, 'there might be.'

''Just as I, bewildered by Miss Henrietta's keen shafts and graceful manœuvres, yield that a woman is, once in a century, gifted with a man's depth of thought and her sex's loveliness.' The comparison was odious. What did I do? Oh, I (the swarthy Ethiop) only rose from my faded arm chair, saluted Mr. Channing (the lordly European) as if I were his partner in a quadrille, and brought out my cameos and mosaics to show him. In about half an hour the beauty of his reasoning and comparison reached his brain, but mine was impenetrable to his most honeyed apologies; as I very sweetly assured him, 'I couldn't understand, didn't see the drift, couldn't connect the links.' Leon says ancient history is a fable, and Herodotus a myth, and all because a woman sat upon the tripod at Delphi, and because a woman wore the helmet and carried the shield of wisdom.'

'What's the matter, Harry?' asked Fanny, compassionately, as her small fingers were stretched like infant grid-irons before her eyes, and a silence ensued.