“At the expiration of Lent, she was introduced to a brilliant assembly, where the gay fandango was succeeded by the soft notes of the seguedilla,--and the crackling of the castanets, and the tinkling of the guitars, marked alternate time to the light and ecstatic step of youth, and the silvery and love-tuned voice of beauty. Touched with delight at all she saw and heard,--the smiles that dimpled and sparkled over her beautiful features reflecting every shade of pleasure they encountered, like the ripplings of a brook kissed by the moon-beams,--she eagerly asked, “And are not these worshipping God?”--“Out on it, daughter!” interposed Donna Clara, who happened to overhear the question; “This is a vain and sinful pastime,--the invention of the devil to delude the children of folly,--hateful in the eyes of heaven and its saints,--and abhorred and renounced by the faithful.”--“Then there are two Gods,” said Isidora sighing, “the God of smiles and happiness, and the God of groans and blood. Would I could serve the former!”--“I will take order you shall serve the latter, heathenish and profane that you are!” answered Donna Clara, as she hurried her from the assembly, shocked at the scandal which her words might have given. These and many similar anecdotes were painfully indited in Donna Clara’s long epistle, which, after being folded and sealed by Fra Jose, (who swore by the habit he wore, he had rather study twenty pages of the Polyglot fasting, than read it over once more), was duly forwarded to Don Francisco. “The habits and movements of Don Francisco were, like those of his nation, so deliberate and dilatory, and his aversion to writing letters, except on mercantile subjects, so well known, that Donna Clara was actually alarmed at receiving, in the evening of the day in which her epistle was dispatched, another letter from her husband.