Her figure was, however, decidedly beautiful. Not merely tall, but pliant, elastic, and graceful in no ordinary degree. She was not generally remarkable for accomplishment. How could she, in the total absence of the most powerful, as well as the most amiable motives to exertion? She had no one to please; no one to watch her progress, to rejoice in her success, to lament her failure. In many branches of education she had not advanced beyond mediocrity, but her dancing was perfection; or rather it would have been so, if to her other graces she had added the charm of gaiety. But that want, as our French dancing-master used to observe, was so universal in this country, that the wonder would have been to see any young lady, whose face in a cotillion (for it was before the days of quadrilles) did not look as if she was following a funeral. Such at thirteen I found Honor O'Callaghan, when I, a damsel some three years younger, was first placed at Mrs. Sherwood's; such five years afterwards I left her, when I quitted the school. Calling there the following spring, accompanied by my good godfather, we again saw Honor silent and pensive as ever. The old gentleman was much struck with her figure and her melancholy. "Fine girl that!" observed he to me; "looks as if she was in love though," added he, putting his finger to his nose with a knowing nod, as was usual with him upon occasions of that kind. I, for my part, in whom a passion for literature was just beginning to develope itself had a theory of my own upon the subject, and regarded her with unwonted respect in consequence. Her abstraction appeared to me exactly that of an author when contemplating some great work, and I had no doubt but she would turn out a poetess. Both conjectures were characteristic, and both, as it happened, wrong. Upon my next visit to London, I found that a great change had happened in Honor's destiny. Her father, whom she had been fond of investing with the dignity of a rebel, but who had, according to Mrs. Sherwood's more reasonable suspicion, been a reckless, extravagant, thoughtless person, whose follies had been visited upon himself and his family, with the evil consequences of crimes, had died in America; and his sister, the richly-jointured widow of a baronet, of old Milesian blood, who during his life had been inexorable to his entreaties to befriend the poor girl, left as it were in pledge at a London boarding-school, had relented upon hearing of his death, had come to England, settled all pecuniary matters to the full satisfaction of the astonished and delighted governess, and finally carried Honor back with her to Dublin.