Then followed six tranquil years in which Holly grew from a small, long-legged, angular child to a very charming maiden of eighteen, dainty with the fragrant daintiness of a southern rosebud; small of stature, as her mother had been before her, yet possessed of a gracious dignity that added mythical inches to her height; no longer angular but gracefully symmetrical with the soft curves of womanhood; with a fair skin like the inner petal of a La France rose; with eyes warmly, deeply brown, darkened by large irises; a low, broad forehead under a wealth of hair just failing of being black; a small, mobile mouth, with lips as freshly red as the blossoms of the pomegranate tree in the corner of the yard, and little firm hands and little arched feet as true to beauty as the needle to the pole. God sometimes fashions a perfect body, and when He does can any praise be too extravagant? For the rest, Holly Wayne at eighteen――or, to be exact, a fortnight before――was perhaps as contradictory as most girls of her age. Warm-hearted and tender, she could be tyrannical if she chose; dignified at times, there were moments when she became a breath-taking madcap of a girl,――moments of which Aunt India strongly but patiently disapproved; affectionate and generous, she was capable of showing a very pretty temper which, like mingled flash of lightning and roar of thunder, was severe but brief; tractable, she was not pliant, and from her father she had inherited settled convictions on certain subjects, such for instance as Secession and Emancipation, and an accompanying dash of contumacy for the protection of them. She was fond of books, and had read every sombre-covered volume of the British Poets from fly-leaf to fly-leaf. She preferred poetry to prose, but when the first was wanting she put up cheerfully with the latter. The contents of her father’s modest library had been devoured with a fine catholicity before she was sixteen. Recent books were few at Corunna, and had Holly been asked to name her favorite volume of fiction she would have been forced to divide the honor between certain volumes of The Spectator, St. Elmo, and The Wide, Wide World. She was intensely fond of being out of doors; even in her crawling days her negro mammy had found it a difficult task to keep her within walls; and so her reading had ever been _al fresco_. Her favorite place was under the gnarled old fig-tree at the end of the porch, where, perched in a comfortable crotch of trunk and branch, or asway in a hammock, she spent many of her waking hours. When the weather kept her indoors, she never thought of books at all. Those stood with her for filtered sunlight, green-leaf shadows, and the perfume-laden breezes.