The mother, who was now so feeble and so helpless, though never a person of much intellectual energy, or indeed of much force of any kind, was yet in the highest sense of the word a lady; she had seen in her youth something of the great world, apart from the rural glens which witnessed her decline; had mingled with the gay and noble even at the court of England, and, being possessed of more than ordinary beauty, had been a favorite and in some degree a belle. From her, then, had her daughters naturally and unconsciously imbibed that easy, graceful finish which, more than all beside, is the true stamp of gentle birth and bearing. Long before children can be brought to comprehend general principles or rules of convention, they can and do acquire habits, by that strange tact of imitation and observance which certainly commences at a stage so early of their young, frail existences, that we cannot, by any effort, mark its first dawning—habits which, thus acquired, can hardly be effaced at all—which will endure unaltered and invariable when tastes, and practices, and modes of thought and action, contracted long, long afterward, have faded quite away and been forgotten. Thus was it, then, with these young creatures; while they were yet mere girls, with all the pure, right impulses of childhood bursting out fresh and fair, they had been trained up in the midst of high, and honorable, and correct associations—naught low, or mean, or little; naught selfish, or dishonest, or corrupt had ever come near to them—in the sight of virtue and in the practice of politeness they had shot up into maturity; and their maturity, of consequence, was virtuous and polished. In after years, devoted as they were to that sick mother, they had no chance of unlearning anything; and thus, from day to day, they went on gaining fresh graces, as it were, by deduction from their foregone teachings, and from the purity of their young natures—for purity and nature, when united, must of necessity be graceful—until the proudest courts of Europe could have shown nothing, even in their most difficult circles, that could surpass, even it could vie with, the easy, artless frankness, the soft and finished courtesy, the unabashed yet modest grace of those two mountain maidens.