"When you know him, you won't talk like that," said Mattie; "he's a gentleman--growing like one fast--and I don't think, young as he is, that he would have acted like that other one you've been silly enough to think about." "Silly!--oh! Mattie, Mattie, that isn't sympathy with me--I don't know whether you're a child, or an old woman--you talk like both of them, and in one breath. Why did I tell you!--why did I tell you!" "Because I was in earnest, and begged hard--because I was afraid, and you could not keep such a secret from me as that; and if you had wanted help--how I would have stood by you!" Harriet noted the kindling eyes, and her heart warmed to the nondescript. "Thank you, Mattie--one friend at least now." "Always,--don't you think so?" "Yes, I do." Mattie was at the door, when Harriet called her back. "Mattie, never a word about this again. I daresay I shall soon forget it, for I am very young; and though it was LOVE, yet I won't let it break my heart. I'm very wretched now. I shall be glad," she added with a yawn, "to lie down and think of all my sorrows." "And sleep them away." "Oh! I shall not close an eye to-night. Good night, Mattie." Miss Harriet Wesden, a young lady who had begun life early, was sleeping soundly three minutes after Mattie's departure from the room. CHAPTER III. OUR CHARACTERS. In our last chapter we have implied that life began early for Harriet Wesden. Before her school-days were finished, and with that precocity for which school-girls of the present era are unhappily distinguished, she was thinking of her lover, and constituting herself the heroine of a little romance, all the more dangerous for being unreal and out of the common track. A tender-hearted girl, with a head not the most strong in the world, is easily impressed by the sentiment, real or assumed, of the first good-looking young fellow whom she may meet. In her own opinion she is not too young to receive admiration, and the consciousness of having impressed one of the opposite sex, arouses her vanity, changes the current of her thoughts, makes the world for awhile a very different place--bright, etherial and unreal. All this very dangerous ground to tread, but the more delightful for its pitfalls; all this a something that has occurred in a greater or less degree to most of us in our time, though we have the good sense to say nothing about it, or to laugh at the follies and the troubles we rashly sought in our nonage. Boys and girls begin their courtships early in these latter days--there is not a girl of sixteen who does not consider herself fit to love and be loved, however demure she may appear, or however much she may be kept back by detestable short frocks and frilled indescribables. And as for our boys, why, they are men of the world immediately they leave school--men of a world that is growing more rapid in its revolutions, and hardens its inhabitants wonderfully fast. It is a singular fact in the history of