that still, sad, patient, silent suffering, which sits from day to day in the one usual chair, unconscious of itself and almost so of all around it; easily pleased by trifles, which it forgets as soon, deriving its sole real and tangible enjoyment from the doze in the summer sunshine, or by the sparkling hearth of winter. Such was the mother now; so utterly, so hopelessly dependent on the cares and gratitude of those bright beings whose infancy she had nursed so devotedly—and well was that devotedness now compensated; for day and night, winter and summer, did those sweet girls by turn watch over the frail, querulous sexagenarian—never both leaving her at once, one sleeping while the other watched, attentive ever to her importunate and ceaseless cravings, patient and mild to meet her angry and uncalled for lamentations. You would have thought that a seclusion so entire, from all society of their equals, must have prevented their acquiring those usual accomplishments, those necessary arts, which every English gentlewoman is presumed to possess as things of course—that they must have grown up mere ignorant, unpolished country lasses, without a taste or aspiration beyond the small routine of their dull daily duties—that long confinement must have broken the higher and more spiritual parts of their fine natural minds—that they must have become mere moping household drudges—and so to think would be so very natural, that it is by no means easy to conceive how it was brought to pass, that the very opposite of this should have been the result. The very opposite it was, however—for as there were not in the whole West Riding two girls more beautiful than Annabel and Marian Hawkwood, so were there surely none so highly educated, so happy in themselves, so eminently calculated to render others happy. Accomplished as musicians both, though Annabel especially excelled in instrumental music, while her young sister was unrivalled in voice and execution as a songstress; both skilled in painting; and if not poetesses in so much as to be stringers of words and rhymes, certainly such, and that too of no mean order, in the wider and far higher acceptation of the word; for their whole souls were attuned to the very highest key of spiritual sensibility—romantic, not in the weak and ordinary meaning of the term, but as admirers of all things high, and pure, and noble—worshippers of the beautiful, whether it were embodied in the wild scenery of their native glens, in the rock, the stream, the forest, the sunshine that clothed all of them in a rich garb of glory, or the dread storm that veiled them all in gloom and terror—or in the master-pieces of the schools of painting and of sculpture—or in the pages of the great, the glorious of all ages—or in the deeds of men, perils encountered hardily, sufferings constantly endured, sorrows assuaged by charitable generosity. Such were they in the strain and tenor of their minds; gentle, moreover, as the gentlest