When the daughter, Sabrina, grew up to sixteen, her beauty, the character she developed, and her general conduct were the topic of quite as much rural conversation and remark as had been the mystery that hung around the mother. Gradually drawn out into the neighboring society, her great personal attractions, added to her shrewdness and good sense, made her so much admired as to collect around her a train of suitors, who seemed to consider her being fatherless as of no more consequence to them than it was to herself. But there was in her temperament an undercurrent of ambition so strong as to cause her to receive their advances toward tender acquaintance with a freezing coldness, while at the same time it rendered her positively unhappy. She felt superior to her condition, and she longed to rise above it. Her mind had attained to a premature development while feeding almost exclusively on its own thoughts,--for she had never been fond of books, though there were many around her. Her sole occupations had been the school, the needle, and assisting her mother in the management of their flower-garden. For this last she had a decided taste, and they had concealed the time-worn character of the old house they occupied by covering it with a luxuriance of floral wealth, so tastefully arranged, and so profuse and gorgeous, that travellers on the dusty highway on which it stood would stop to admire the remarkable blending of the climbing rose, the honeysuckle, and the grape. Thus filled with indefinite longings, she grew up to womanhood without any proper direction from her mother. She had no sympathy with her uncultivated suitors. She sighed for something higher, an ideal that was far off, indistinct, and dim. Good offers of marriage from neighboring workmen of fair character and prospects she stubbornly declined, sometimes with a tartness that quite confounded the swain whom her well-known character had half-intimidated before he ventured on the dangerous proposal. Love had not yet unsealed the deep fountain of her singularly constituted heart. But I suppose that there must somewhere be a key to every woman's affections, and that it is generally found in but few hands,--sometimes in safe ones, sometimes in very dangerous ones. It was so with Sabrina.