Though the indulgence of all her whims and fancies by her doting grandparents was a danger of no small magnitude, Helen encountered a still greater peril in the shape of a vast store of novels, poems, and romances, which Miss Cornelia had accumulated, and to which she was continually making additions. In that young lady's bedchamber, where Helen slept, there was a large bookcase full of these seductive volumes; even the upper shelves of the wardrobe closet, and a cupboard over the mantel, were closely packed with them; and there was not one of them all which Helen had not read by the time she was fifteen. Thus, in spite of natural good sense, strengthened and educated by much wise and wholesome instruction, she grew up with an imagination quite disproportioned to her other mental faculties; so that, in some respects, she was almost as romantic in her notions as her Aunt Cornelia, who, at forty, used to prefer moonlight to good honest sunshine, and would have heard with an emotion of delight that the mountains between Belfield and Hartford were infested by a band of brigands, in picturesque attire, with a handsome chief like Rinaldo Rinaldini, or haunted by two or three dashing highwaymen, of the genteel Paul-Clifford style. Indeed, the ideal lover, to whom for many years Miss Cornelia's heart was constant as the moon, was a tall, dark, mysterious man, with a heavy beard and glittering eyes, who, there is every reason to suspect, was either a corsair, a smuggler, or a bandit chief.