When the day arrived, I went to St. Charles Street, a quarter greatly superior to St. Thomas Street. The houses were aristocratic, being of classic design, with pillared porticoes, and wide, cool verandahs, looking out upon garden-shrubbery and flowering magnolias. Mr. Stanley was in an easy-chair, awaiting me. But for that, I should have hesitated at mounting the wide steps, so imposing the establishment appeared. He took me by the hand to an ample room luxuriously furnished, and introduced me to a fragile little lady, who was the picture of refinement. My reception was of such a character that it led me to believe she was as tender and mild as her quiet and subdued looks; and the books on the centre table made me think her pious. Nothing could have been better calculated to conquer my shyness than the gracious welcome she accorded me. We took our respective places at once, she as a motherly patroness, and I as a devotedly-grateful protégé, fully sensible of what was due to her as the wife of my benefactor. Her husband stood towering over me with his hand on my head, and an encouraging smile on his face, that I might speak out without fear; and he watched the impression I made on his wife. The ordeal of presentation was made easy through her natural goodness, and the gentle art she possessed of winning my confidence. She placed me on a divan near her, and I was soon prattling away with a glibness that a few minutes before would have been deemed impossible to such a stocky boy. To confine within a sentence my impressions of the first lady I ever conversed with, is entirely beyond my power. There was an atmosphere about her, in the first place, which was wholly new. The elaborateness and richness of dress, the purity and delicacy of her face, the exquisite modulations of her voice, the distinctness of her enunciation, and the sweet courtesy of her manner, I will not say awed me, but it kindled as much of reverence as ever I felt in my life. If I were to combine this with a feeling that the being beside me might command me to endure practically any torture, or dare any danger, for her sake, it will perhaps sum up the effect which this gentlewoman made on my raw mind. It was at this hour I made the discovery of the immense distance between a lady and a mere woman; and, while I gazed at her clear, lustrous eyes, and noted the charms which played about her features, I was thinking that, if a lady could be so superior to an ordinary housewife, with her careless manner of speech, and matter-of-fact ways, what a beautiful thing an angel must be!