One of the families in which Willis was an _habitué_ was the household of Mrs. Apthorp, a widow with four lovely daughters, who conducted one of the seminaries for young ladies for which New Haven was famous. This was the original of Mrs. Ilfrington’s school in “The Cherokee’s Threat.” Willis was much ridiculed by the reviewers for his very high-colored description of this educational establishment, and in particular for declaring that “in the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael” he had “scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were assembled in my sophomore year,” in this Connecticut “sugar-refinery.” His lines “On the Death of a Young Girl” were written on the occasion of the death of one of this family, some years after. The “Lines to Laura W----, Two Years of Age”--one of two selections from Willis in Emerson’s “Parnassus”--were addressed to a little New Haven girl, the sister and biographer of Theodore Winthrop. Another friend of Willis’s was a Mrs. De Forest, widow of the American consul at Buenos Ayres, a lady of fortune, who came to New Haven, and bought a house facing the green, where she gave fashionable parties. She was herself a beautiful woman, and her daughters, Julia and Pastora--_matre pulchra filiæ pulchriores_--were great belles among the students in Chevalier Wikoff’s day, who describes one of them as a “perfect blonde,” and the other as a “matchless brunette.” The religious impressions which had been stamped upon Willis’s mind by the Andover revival were gradually obliterated by the preoccupations of undergraduate life. He did not definitely renounce his profession, and remained till graduation in communion with the college church. But the state of his soul gave deep anxiety to his good parents, who looked upon him, as he did upon himself, as a backslider. In a letter to his father during a season of “ingathering” in the college, stimulated by the eloquent preaching of Professor Fitch, he wrote as follows:-- “My own experience makes me very much alive to the frequent fallacy of the hopes which are experienced in revivals. I understand your anxiety for me, and I understand the feelings which prompted mother’s most tender and affectionate addition to your letter. If I perish it will not be because I do not _know_ my duty, for there are few who have been better instructed. But my feelings are most peculiar and most trying. I am under one ceaseless and enduring conviction of sin; one wearing anxiety about my soul, without making any visible progress. I know what you will write about it. I could anticipate every word you can say upon the point. But so it is, and I have done with _all_ discussion of it.”