When Letty was about thirteen years of age, a fashionable boarding-school was opened in the village, and the old man yielded at once to her wishes to become a day-scholar at it. Here her ambition carried her rapidly onward, and if Letty, when she entered it, was comparatively a raw, ignorant country-girl, no one who saw her at the termination of her course of studies there, could have recognized in the graceful, intelligent, and accomplished girl before him, the little awkward being, who, four years before had there commenced her career. The principal of the school, an elegant and accomplished lady, was early attracted to her by her aptitude for learning, and her desire to acquire it, and Letty was soon a favorite pupil. Nor whilst cultivating her mind did she neglect her person. The elegant manners of her preceptress made a most decided impression on her; gradually she found her own forming on the model before her, and in process of time, though she made no pretensions to great beauty, it would have been difficult to have found a more attractive person than Letty Rawdon, the tailor’s daughter. The young men of the village and neighborhood were the first to make this discovery, and at all the general merry-makings which occurred, Letty Rawdon was, beyond all rivalry, the village belle. We say general merry-makings, for our village, like all others large and small, had its aristocracy, and in the eyes of the “upper circle,” we mean the female part of it, of its fifteen hundred inhabitants, she was only “that conceited, forward thing, the daughter of old Rawdon, the tailor.” Mrs. Baxter, the wife of the leading lawyer of the place, in an interview with Mrs. Danforth, the wife of the physician, had settled—“that, although they supposed in their small place they must know the tailor’s daughter when they met her in the street, or at church, or other public place, still she was not to be on any account admitted into their set.” How often has many a lovely girl been thus tabooed, not that she would not confer honor on them, but she might mayhap be in the way of an advantageous settlement of some marriageable daughters, perchance less attractive than herself.