world—nay, even over those ghastly fences, which then, as now, it seemed to be her greatest delight to ‘negotiate,’ as I think you hunting men call it in your extraordinary vernacular. She had a wonderfully graceful figure too, as a young thing, and the narrowest, most flexible hands and feet you ever beheld. I have waltzed with her many a time—_moi qui vous parle_; and to think of the delicious swing with which she went down a room to the strains of Jullien and Kœnig, the musical wonders of _our_ day, almost makes me feel as if I could waltz again. When she bridled her taper neck, and put one little foot forward from beneath her draperies, she looked like a filly just going to start for the Oaks. “I have been thus particular in describing her, because they tell me she is very much aged and altered now; so that, whenever you do see her, you can judge for yourself of the difference between the Miss Merlin of to-day, and the damsel of a good many years ago, who made such an example of your old friend. “But I never had a chance with her—never! She was a singular girl, not the least like most of her own age and sex. Her mother was dead; and she lived and kept house for her father, an old clergyman of eccentric habits and extraordinary learning. Being an only child, she was accustomed to have her own way from the first; and as her father never interfered in the household arrangements, and indeed seldom came out of his study upon any provocation, she had the whole management of the establishment, and conducted it with the decision and prudence of a woman of forty. To this I partly attribute her extraordinary self-reliance and self-control. She was attached to her father, and studied with him several hours a day. At the period when we used to dance together, I think Miss Merlin was as thorough a Greek scholar as any University don I know. She was a proficient in several modern languages, and my own impression is that mathematics and algebra were as completely at her fingers’-ends, as worsted-work and crochet-knitting are to the generality of her sex. Studying hard at the Parsonage, her only relaxation was to hunt. I have already said she did exactly what she pleased; and her father, though a clergyman, was a rich man, and though a rich man a liberal one. Consequently Miss Fanny, as she was called then, was allowed to keep a couple of horses for her own use, and very good ones she took care they should be. At eighteen there was not a sportsman with the X.Y.Z. that cared to follow Fanny Merlin in a quick thing over the Vale, where the fences were largest, and the Swimley twisted and twined about, like the silver lace on a green volunteer uniform, never less than eighteen feet from bank to bank. I always hated hunting, I honestly acknowledge it; but oh! the duckings I have had in that accursed Swimley, following the flutter of her riding-habit, that I _would_ have followed, if necessary, across the Styx. The girl never