determining the physical and mental contour of the Southern girl. She is slender, well developed, lithe, graceful, rather inclined to repose, not strikingly intellectual, has strong domestic inclinations and bears about with her an air of provincial innocency and naïveté that has a marked flavor of the isolation and the freedom of the plantation. Mrs. Ransom had been very little in city society; a winter in New Orleans and a few visits to Savannah limiting her experience beyond that obtained from a residence in the dreamy, isolated little old place of her birth, Pensacola. She was not a Catholic, but the rudiments of her education had been obtained in a convent, and something of that demure quietness and quaintness of manner characteristic of the nun had remained with her. No doubt her short and trying married experience had modified her charms of person and character to an interesting extent, adding an inexpressible value to her beauty. A trace of lingering sadness, slight but always present, gave a mild emphasis to the purity of her face and the low music of her voice. Such a woman could not fail to touch the heart of a fervid and passionate man like Reynolds, whose whole nature had been introverted for years, and whose life had been so long repressed and stagnant. During the half delirium of his fever, while the inflammation of his wound was at its worst, he lay and watched her come and go, his heated vision making an angel of her about whose ethereally lovely form halos and rainbow colors played fantastic tricks. Sometimes the apparition was double, and then one of the angels took the form of poor little Milly White, whose haunting, hungry face flashed with a heavenly light. But as he grew stronger and the fever left him, it was Agnes Ransom, the pale, sweet, earnest little woman, that controlled his every thought. He was content to lie there and patiently wait on nature's slow work so long as she hovered near. He felt securely fixed in her love. Every word, that in the stress of agony, she had uttered up there in the ruin, lay like some divine germ in his heart, growing and strengthening with every moment. He did not seek to have her say more and he said little himself. When she fetched flowers from the out-door conservatory, grand cream-white and blush camellias, roses, jasmine and violets, and arranged them on the odd little mahogany table by his bedside, he would whisper some tender phrase of thanks and love, and then she would sit by the window and read aloud to him some forgotten romance, such as is to be found in every ancient Southern library. Happy invalid! to have such balm for his wound! And so the days of his convalescence drew by, not in pain and fretfulness and impatience, but freighted with the richest gifts of love. He was like one in some favored nook of fairy land, realizing the tenderest visions of dreams.