She can show art rules to astonish her. How like the nimble winds, which play upon The tender grass, yet press it not, or fly Over the crystal face of smoothest streams, Leaving no curl behind them. She makes Motion the god of every excellence, And what the muses would with study find, She teaches in her dancing—— To me It must suffice only to say, ’tis she. Beaumont & Fletcher. “Here I am again, dear Miss Enna,” said my darling, pretty friend, Kate Wilson, to me the other morning. I have already introduced Kate to you, dear reader; and if you had looked into the deep wells of her beaming, bright eye as often as I have, and heard the rich, gushing music of her laugh, you would hail her approach, even though she did plunge unceremoniously into your _sanctum_, and interrupt you in your studies, or your deep divings into your imagination for something particularly clever, out of which to form a “readable story” for “Mr. Graham’s next Monthly.” I felt a little annoyed, I must admit, on the morning in question, for I was very earnestly engaged—not in writing, dear reader; oh, no! I spared you that one morning—but in looking over an old writing-desk, that I had not opened for years. It was one that belonged to my mother; and one part I had devoted to her treasured gifts, in the other, for it is a large, capacious, old-fashioned affair, not at all like the little rosewood, mother-of-pearl inlaid thing which has usurped its place on my writing-table; in the other part I have stored gifts, letters, and remembrances of my school-girl days; and this part I was exploring as Kate entered. I had just been sighing over a package, containing letters, a bracelet of hair, and a faded bunch of flowers—mementoes of a dear friend, long since laid in the cold grave, and was almost weeping over remembrances of the past. To me that is the only sad thing in growing old. If those we love could only live to cheer and comfort us, old age would have no terrors. A single woman feels this particularly; for if a woman marries, she forms new connections, and looks forward to a new life, and new interests, in the future of her children; but “we poor old maids” are oftentimes very lonely.