she laughed--into a row of pearls encased in a casket of ruby. That is my description of white teeth in red lips, and I think it is far from bad. Then Miss Sophia was immensely tall, and immensely thin; and in the mornings when she appeared _en negligee_, as they say in the _Morning Post_, her clothes hung straight down in perpendicular descent, so that she looked exactly like the canvass air funnels that you see in a steam-boat: and there were no outs and ins, or ups and downs, about her figure from top to toe; and I found it impossible, for a particular reason, to supply these deficiencies by the exercise of my ingenuity in description And that particular reason was this,--that she did it herself. Lord! what a change took place on Miss Sophia as you saw her gliding about the room like a half emptied pillow-case in the morning, and the grand and _distinguee_ (_Morning Post_ again) individual that choked up all the doorways, and occupied whole sofas, when you met her at a party at night. Then there were such flounces and tucks, and furbelows,--she sailed through the room enveloped in such awful circumgyrations of muslin--so pulled in at the waist, and so inflated every where else, that she looked--as you saw only her neck and shoulders emerging from the enormous circle in which the rest of her was buried--like an intrepid aeronaut who has fallen by some accident through a hole in the balloon, and you were lost in calculations of the length of darning-needle that would be needed to reach to the _vera superficies_. Now if I invent, I like to have the honour of the invention entirely to myself; and I found it impracticable to extract a heroine from seven or eight spring gauze petticoats, and a roll of millinery below the waist, that looked like a military cloak rolled up on the crupper of a life-guardsman's saddle. Then poor Martha Brown was too young, and at that time too bashful, for a heroine; and besides, there was no getting over the blot on her birth. Theodore Fitzhedingham could never think of paying attention to the daughter of a Hindoo woman and old Sneezum, the bullock contractor of Bunderjumm. One day I had been at work in one of the plantations, and just as I was marking with my hand-axe a birch tree to be felled, a thought came into my head. I left the cross half executed, and threw the axe on the bank, hurried home, and locked myself in the study. Pen and paper were lying before me, and in a moment I had got deep into the introduction of my heroine. She was an orphan thrown on Fitzhedingham's care--young, beautiful, accomplished, but of unknown mysterious parentage--and the _denouement_ to consist in the discovery that her father was----but I won't mention it just now, for half the value of these things consists in the surprise. I will give you a page or two of it, only begging you to remark how entirely a man's style alters when he gets into a serious work. Here I go gabbling on and on to you, without much regard to style,