On their first arrival at their new dwelling, little Julie offered no particular promise of beauty. Her large, wild, Italian eyes, and the dark hair which clustered round her forehead, were all that could have saved her from being called a very plain child. But as years passed over her head, and she grew towards womanhood, a thousand latent charms sprang up in her face and person. Like a homely bud that blossoms into loveliness, her beauties expanded with time, and she became one of the fairest of nature's works. Beauty can scarcely be well described. I know not how it is; whether imagination far exceeds nature, or whether remembrance is ever busy to recall what love once decked in adventitious charms, but every one has raised an ideal standard in his own mind, which is fairer to him than all that painter or statuary ever portrayed. Description, therefore, must fall far short of what Julie really was. Let all men, then, draw from their own mind. She was lovely as imagination can conceive; and there were few of those who, by any chance, beheld her, that were so critical or so fastidious as to find or fancy a fault in her beauty; and as the strangers who did see were ever sure to ask, among the neighbouring peasantry, who she was, and to describe her by her loveliness, she soon acquired the name of the Beauty of Arles. It seldom happens that many perfections cluster together. If beauty be granted, wit is often denied; and if wit and beauty unite, vanity, or some other deteriorating quality, is generally superadded. But it is not always so. Nature had dealt liberally to Julie of all her stores. She might know that she was lovely, for where is the woman that is not conscious of it; but in her solitude there was none to tell her of her charms, and she was not vain of them. The bright wild genius, the warm vivid imagination, that revelled in her breast, and sparkled in the dark flashes of her eye, was guided and tempered by the softest, gentlest, heart that ever beat within a woman's bosom. She had no means of comparing her own mind with that others, and she did not know that it was superior; and all the accomplishments and knowledge that her father had taken care she should acquire appeared to her what all human knowledge really is--but little to that which may be known. In the mean time, the mind of Armand Villars had undergone scarce any change; his feelings were the same; but, if at all altered, they were only the harder and the more inflexible. If his daughter possessed his affection, it was seldom that any trait of gentleness betrayed it; and, as if fearful of again loving any human thing, he passed the greater part of his time in utter solitude, from which even his child was excluded.