Their table was supplied by the garden, the dairy, and the river, which afforded excellent fish, crabs, and oysters—while their pocket money was supplied by the hire of several negroes owned by them. The girls were beautiful—and, poor as they were, it was thought not impossible that they might marry well. The elder sister, Rosalie, was a merry, plump, golden-haired, blue-eyed lassie, with a complexion that the country beaux compared to strawberries and cream—she was the first to fulfil the happy auguries drawn for her. She was seen by a young merchant of Baltimore, who happened to have business at Churchill’s Point, and after rather a short courtship, she was wedded and carried off to the city home of her husband. Sophie Churchill, now bereaved and alone at seventeen, devoted herself with all the enthusiasm of her ardent, loving nature, to the care and education of her infant niece, and little Hagar grew passionately fond of her aunt. Her sole domestic was an old woman, a pure Guinea negress, who, seventy years before, in her childhood, had been torn from her native coast, brought to this country, and sold. She had served the Churchill family for three generations, and was nearly eighty years old—yet with the strong tenacity of life distinguishing the native African, she still kept up and at work, seemingly in all her mid-life vigor. Now, reader, I am telling you no invented story—so do you not think that there was something slightly romantic about the position of this young girl, left with the charge of an infant, living in an old ruin, on a bleak shore, and having no other companion or attendant but the old Guinea negress? _Real life_ is full of the picturesque and the romantic. I have never yet needed to cull flowers from the fields of imagination. The gardens of memory and tradition will furnish materials for a life of romance writing. CHAPTER II. THE MINISTER. “——Gentleness And a strange strength, a calm o’errulling strength, Are mixed within him so that neither take Possession from the other—neither rise In mastery or passion—but both grow Harmoniously together.” W. G. SIMMS.