soul! _so_ sad for her!), for Pamela used to give Garda lessons; she moulded her, as she called it, taught her to shoot--of course I mean the young idea, and not guns. In fact, they have all had a hand in it--the moulding of Garda; too many, I think, for _I_ believe in _one_ overruling eye, and if you get round that, there's the good old proverb that remains pretty true, after all, I reckon, the one about too many cooks, though in this case the broth has been saved by the little mother, who is a very Napoleon in petticoats, and never forgets a thing; she actually remembers a thing _before_ it has happened; Methuselah himself couldn't do more, though, come to think of it, I suppose very little had happened in the world before _his_ day--excepting trilobites, that we used to read about in school. And Mistress Thorne knows all about _them_, you may be sure, just as well as Methuselah did; for she was a teacher, to begin with, a prim little New England school marm whom poor Eddie Thorne met by accident one summer when he went north, and fell in love with, as I have always supposed, from sheer force of contrast, like Beauty and the Beast, you know--not that she was a beast, of course, though poor Eddie _was_ very handsome, but still I remember that everybody wondered, because it had been thought that he would marry the sister of Madame Giron, who had hair that came down to her feet. However, I ought to say that poor little Mistress Thorne has certainly done her very best to acquire our southern ways; she has actually tried to make herself over, root, stem, and branch, from her original New England sharpness to our own softer temperament, though I always feel sure, at the same moment, that, in the core of the rock, the old sap burns still--like the soul under the ribs of death, you know; not that I mean that exactly (though she _is_ thin), but simply that the leopard cannot change his spots, nor the zebra his stripes, nor," added the good lady--altering her tone to solemnity as she perceived that her language was becoming Biblical--"the wild _cony_ her _young_. Just to give you an idea of what I mean, Mr. Winthrop: for a long time after she first came to Gracias that little creature used regularly to parse twenty-four pages of 'Paradise Lost' every day, as a sort of mental tonic, I reckon, against what she thought the enervating tendencies of our southern life here--like quinine, you know; and as she parsed so much, she was naturally obliged to quote, as a sort of safety-valve, which was very pleasant of course and very intellectual, though I never care much for quotations myself, they are so diffuse, and besides, with all your efforts, you cannot make 'Paradise Lost' appropriate to all the little daily cares of life and house-keeping, which no true woman, I think, should be above; for though Eve _did_ set a table for the angel, that was merely poetical and not like real life in the least, for she