The letters were very sweet, by reason of the tender motherly spirit which pervaded every line,--more or less ill-spelt here and there, and by no means well written, but over-flowing with affection. Again and again the writer implored her “dearest Sissy” not to fret, and to look forward to the holidays, which would come very soon, when Sissy would see her dear mother and father, whose household love she pined for in the great middle-class boarding-school, as it was evident by the tone of maternal letters which replied to lamentations from desolate home-sick Sissy. There were hampers for dearest Sissy, and little presents,--a coral necklace from father, a sash from mother, and once, a tinselled portrait of Mr. Edmund Kean in the character of Othello, with a tunic of real crimson satin let into the paper,--a tinselled portrait which had been poor unsettled Daniel’s labour of love in the long winter evenings, and which the mother dwelt on with evident pleasure. Eustace knew that these letters had been written by his grandmother,--the grandmother who had never held him in her arms, or taken pride in his baby graces. He lingered lovingly over the old-fashioned sheets of letter-paper--he gazed fondly upon the stiffly-formed signature, “Elizabeth Mayfield,” and he dropped some few tears upon the worn yellow paper, which had been blotted with many tears before to-day. It was not possible that he could think of his mother in her innocent school-days without emotion. The second packet contained only three letters, addressed to dearest Sissy at home, when she had ceased to be a school-girl, and these were in a hand not altogether unfamiliar to Eustace. It was a youthful modification of Daniel Mayfield’s inscrutable calligraphy; and again Eustace Thorburn smiled with the same faint smile. The letters were written from a lawyer’s office where the lad was articled; for Daniel had persisted in his aversion to his father’s business, and had declared himself unfitted for anything upon earth except the law, for which he was assured he had a special vocation. They were pleasant, boyish letters, and full of the slang of the day--such locutions as “Flare up!” and “What a shocking bad hat!” and “There you go with your eye out!” and other conversational embellishments peculiar to the period. But through all the slang and young-mannish affectations there was an undercurrent of genuine affection for the writer’s “dear little dark-eyed Sissy.” He knew no end of pretty girls in London, he told her, but not one worthy to be compared with his darling Celia. “And when I am on the Rolls, with slap-up chambers of my own in the Fields, and a first-rate business, you shall come and keep house for me, Sissy; and we’ll have a little cottage at Putney, and a wherry, and I’ll row you up the river every evening after business; and while my sentimental little sister sits in the stern reading a novel, her faithful Daniel will get himself into training for a sculling-match.”