"I cannot get warm," said she; "I believe I _have_ caught my death-cold;" and throwing her still shivering limbs on the bed, she told Agnes to bury her in blankets, and then let her sleep. Can we suppose that guardian angels hovered over the couch, and watched the slumbers of this youthful beauty? There was no hallowed spot in her chamber, where she was accustomed to kneel in penitence, gratitude, and adoration, before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Perhaps, when a mere child, she had been taught to repeat the Lord's Prayer at her nurse's knee, but never had her heart ascended unto Him, who created her for his glory, and breathed into her frame a portion of his own immortal Spirit. She had been educated solely for the circles of fashion, to glitter and be admired--to dance, to sing, to dress, to talk, and that was all. She knew that she must one day die, and when the bell tolled, and the long funeral darkened the way, she was reluctantly reminded of her own mortality. But she banished the dreadful and mysterious thought, as one with which youth, beauty, and health had nothing to do, and as suited only to the infirmities of age, and the agonies of disease. As for the judgment beyond the grave, that scene of indescribable grandeur, when every created being must stand before the presence of uncreated glory, "to give an account of the deeds done in the body," she deemed it shocking and sacrilegious to think of a subject so awful; and, to do her justice, she never heard it mentioned except from the pulpit (for there are fashionable churches, and Ellen was the belle of the church as well as of the ball-room). Thus living in practical atheism, labouring to bring every thought and feeling in subjection to the bondage of fashion, endeavouring to annihilate the great principle of immortality struggling within her, Ellen Loring was as much the slave of vice as the votary of pleasure. Like the king of Babylon, who took the golden vessels from the temple of the Lord, and desecrated them at his unhallowed banquet, she had robbed her _soul_, that temple of the living God, of its sacred treasures, and appropriated them to the revelries of life. But the hour was approaching, when the invisible angel of conscience was to write on the walls of memory those mystic characters which a greater than Daniel alone can interpret. * * * * *