"As I grew older, I exhibited a remarkable love of reading, and as no one took the trouble to direct my tastes, I seized every book which came within my reach and devoured it, with the avidity of a hungry and unoccupied mind. My father was a gentleman of pure and elegant taste, and had he dreamed that I was exposed, without guardianship, to dangerous influences, he would have shielded and warned me. But he believed the care of children under twelve years of age devolved on their mother, and he was always engrossed with the duties of a profession which he passionately loved, or the society of his brother officers, usually so fascinating and convivial. "I used to take my book, which was generally some wild, impassioned romance, and wandering to the ramparts, seat myself by the shining pyramids of cannon-balls; and while the blue waves of the Chesapeake rolled in murmuring music by, or, lashed by the ocean wind, heaved in foaming billows, roaring against the walls, I yielded myself to the wizard spell of genius and passion. The officers as they passed would try to break the enchantment by gay and sportive words, but all in vain. I have sat there, drenched by the salt sea-spray, and knew it not. I was called the little bookworm, the prodigy, the _dream-girl_, a name you have inherited, my darling Gabriella; and my father seemed proud of the reputation I had established. But while my imagination was preternaturally developed, my heart was slumbering, and my soul unconscious of life's great aim. "Thus unguarded by precept, unguided by example, I was sent from home to a boarding-school, where I acquired the usual education and accomplishments obtained at fashionable female seminaries. During my absence from home, my two step-sisters, who were thought too young to accompany me, and my infant step-brother, died in the space of one week, smitten by that destroying angel of childhood, the scarlet fever. "I had been at school two years when I made my first visit home. My step-mother was then in the weeds of mourning, and of course excluded herself in a measure from gay society; but I marvelled that sorrow had not impaired the bloom of her cheek, or quenched the sparkle of her cold, bright eye. Her heart was not buried in the grave of her children,--it belonged to the world, to which she panted to return.