his plaything; leave me to manage, you shall be comfortable." Every device which innocence and affection could suggest, was now practised in her playful hours with her doating father. She could not study in the common parlour, she should never think herself at school. My father ordered Mr. Percival to choose his own apartment; and a room was dignified with the name of my study. It were endless to enumerate the means this "spoiled child," to use Miss Flint's epithet, employed to lesson the mortifying circumstances of my situation. Her winning smiles, her sweet persuasions, her playful vivacity, had in appearance but one stimulus;--_my ease and comfort_. She rode on horseback, because this produced a horse for Percival's use, who was to attend her. She loved only what he preferred at table, and even in her application to my lessons, she was excited by the desire of serving me. My father soon discovered by Mary's proficiency in arithmetic and writing, that her schoolmaster was not ignorant in the multiplication table; and I, satisfied with my dear pupil's improvement, and gratified by her affection, became more reconciled to my situation. Mary's age, when in her seventeenth year, produced her a new title. "The spoiled child" was dismissed for "the idle girl," and lectures on the loss of time were not spared. With serious remembrance of my mother's too prophetic words, I laboured incessantly to implant in my lovely sister those principles of conduct, which in female life, particularly, are of more worth than all the learning of the schools. The regulation of her heart, and the strengthening her judgment, neither deprived her of her native simplicity, nor diverted her attention from the occupations of her sex. She continued to be my father's source of joy and comfort; and with a temper and an address, which it must be confessed, peculiarly marks the fair sex, and which, when employed as Heaven intended, renders a woman irresistible, she converted at her pleasure, the ungracious refusal into kindness, gloom into social content, and fretful complainings into laughter and delight. One triumph of this angel in form and mind, I cannot omit. She had by her innocent exertions to please her father, persuaded him, that at seventeen years of age, it was time for her to begin to economize her own little purse. "It is now three months since I was as old as my sister, when she had her regular allowance," added she, "and it would be the means of making me more careful and industrious, like Lucretia, had I the management of my clothes and expences. My dear mother used to say," continued she, changing her seat for my father's knee, as though sensible that she could thus more successfully transpose into his bosom a portion of that benevolence which warmed her own, "that nothing was more useful to a girl, than committing to her care the annual sum requisite to her expences. The pleasure of saving a trifle for some favourite poor