O, the change that two years produce on a girl of fourteen!--two years of health, and wealth, and education! There came towards us, from the outer drawing-room, a figure as perfect as ever was revealed to sculptor--with intelligence and sweetness radiating from a countenance such as no sculptor could ever fix in marble. She did not walk, she touched the floor with her feet, and seemed to repress a bound at every step, that would have sent her dancing in like a Hebe holding forth a wine-cup, or like one of the nymphs of Venus, who are all far prettier, I beg to say, than Venus herself--tripping forward and scattering roses on the pathway of the goddess. Never did I see so radiant a beauty, combined (when you examined the features, the firm lip, and high imperial brow) with as much dignity and power. The dignity and power were hidden, to be sure, below the transparent veil of her sixteen summers; but there they were, ready to expand when that veil was removed--a dissolving view, as it were, where the solid outlines and severe majesty of a Grecian temple were already faintly visible over the disappearing lineaments of a bower in fairyland. From this glorious apparition I looked to Mr Hooker--good features, but inexpressive; eyes blue and feeble; nose finely chiselled, but effeminate; lips well shaped, but uneducated; and a bearing mock-easy, mock-aristocratic--loud, conceited, contemptible! I could have killed him with ineffable delight. Her father was unchanged; the same stately presence, the same benevolent smile, the same appearance of having Golconda in one pocket, and the Bank of England in the other, and a chuckle in his voice as if his throat was filled with guineas. How is it, thought I, as I looked at the father and daughter, that wealth always softens and refines the woman, while it only swells out and amplifies the man? In the man, we see the counting-house resisting, or ill accommodating itself to the drawing-room. There is either an uneasy effort to escape from the ledger, or a still more painful attempt to convert it into a book of fashionable life. He has had fights about sugar in the morning, disquisitions with underwriters, reports of bankruptcies in Ceylon, of short crops in Jamaica, or a fall in the funds in Mexico, and he finds it impossible to give himself up entirely to the careless enjoyment of an evening assemblage of friends, and yet cannot relieve his mind by making the objects of his thoughts the subject of his conversation. So he takes to political talk, by way of doing the genteel, and discusses Lord George, or Sir Robert, or Lord John, in the violent effort he makes to escape from indigo and muscovadoes. With the daughter how different! Here wealth merely represents the absence of those petty and worrying annoyances which narrow the circle of thought, when a grim vision of the weekly bills is seldom long absent from the mind. She has magnificence, luxury, refinement all round her,