'From the time Laetitia first learned to speak, she came to me with all her troubles and her interests, and I was always glad to be her sympathizer, her counsellor, and her playmate. When she was five or six years old she went to the nearest district school. She was always a marked girl, from her extreme homeliness, her excellent scholarship, her boldness in all active sports, and an odd humor which never failed to interest and amuse. My mother's prophecy, alas! was not fulfilled. She grew no prettier, but rather the reverse. She was the same in childhood as when you knew her, with the high, bold forehead, crowned with white, towy hair, small greenish-gray eyes, shaded and yet not shaded with light yellowish eyelashes, short and thin; scanty eyebrows of the same color; a nose so small and flat it seemed scarcely a projection from her face; teeth tolerably good, but chin and mouth receding in a peculiar manner, and very disagreeably; and a thick, waxy complexion, worse in childhood than of late years, for the spirit had not then found its way through it, as it did afterward. Moreover, by a singular malignancy of fortune, when she was twelve years old, she was attacked with varioloid, and taking a severe cold as she was getting well, had a relapse, and was left as you see her, not closely marked, but sufficiently pitted to attract attention. 'My parents thought more of education than the Sunderlands, and my advantages were much better than Laetitia's. I went for some time to a good select school in the town, and afterward two years to an excellent boarding school. When Laetitia had learned all that her instructors in the little district school could teach her, she came to me and begged that I would let her read with me. I was very glad to do so, and soon after my cousin and niece joined us. To those readings I am indebted for some of the most delightful hours of my life. My pupils, as I used to call them, were at that age when childhood is verging into womanhood, and it was my delight to watch the first dawnings of consciousness in their minds, the first awakening to the realities of life. Laetitia was the youngest of the three, but she was as intelligent and mature as the others. How well I remember the glow of enthusiasm with which she read of the heroes and martyrs of old, the intense sympathy with which she entered into the _amor patriae_ of the Greek and Roman, and her fervent admiration for the nobleness of action which this feeling called forth in them!