Jemima, however, though she did her best to obtain forgiveness for her friends, did not fail to warn them in private of their improvidence. "Out of sight out of mind," was an apothegm which she urged with reiterated pathos, to deter the inhabitants of Henbury from renouncing the world, which she assured them "could not be drawn on and off like a glove." Nothing, in fact, could be more hostile to Miss Ferret's views than divisions and schisms, which, by splitting a neighbourhood into parties, diminished its general hospitality; or those withdrawings from society through sickness or sorrow, which lessened the gregarious tendencies of the people amongst whom she lived. We may therefore give her full credit for not leaving, as she herself expressed it, "a stone unturned" to bring our pair of recluses to reason, and induce them to seek their felicity where she found her own, namely, in the festive coterie. But Mrs. Hartland in the course of her new studies had, some how or other, stumbled upon the remarkable sentence which Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, when a boy, wrote with a pencil at the bottom of a map of Riga, demonstrative of those talents which were one day to astonish the world: "Dieu me l'a donnée et le diable ne me l'otera pas," and with maternal energy she replied in these celebrated words, intimating by their appropriation to her own case, the same heroic resolutions which inspired the Swede, to preserve that which had been granted to _her_ arms. "My dear Jemima," added she, unconsciously drawing up her head as she spoke, "there is nothing easier than for people to talk who are not mothers. I cannot perform by halves, the momentous duty which it has pleased heaven to devolve upon me. The sacred task can only be fulfilled by an entire devotion, and we must give ourselves up to the faithful discharge of this awful trust. Lady Goodman, too, has never known what it is to be a mother (raising her head still higher); and really, my dear, it is impossible, even for the best intentioned of one's friends who are _inexperienced_, to enter into the tremendous responsibilities of a parent."