He had not escaped the dangers incident to youth, and his heart had become attached to a lady of Baltimore--one of the undeviatingly arch and winning American girls--to whom he had been introduced by her brother, a commercial correspondent. The nature of his affairs--he was the secretary of an English company which operated some copper mines in Arizona and Canada--had made him a frequent visitor to the shores of the New World, and he had not been unwilling to express his hope that the United States would become his final home. These sentiments were quite honest, though it might have elicited the cynical observation that the capture of his affections by Miss Garrett had done more to weaken his loyalty to the crown than any dispassionate admiration of a Republican form of government. But the imputation would have been malicious. Leacraft did feel an earnest admiration for the American people, and yielded a genial acquiescence to the claims of popular suffrage. His connexion with America had been fortunate, and he had come in contact with men and women whose natures by endowment, and whose manners and habits, conversation and tastes, by inheritance and cultivation, were elevating and engaging--men and women whose nobility of sympathy with all things human was reflected in an art of living not only always decorous and refined, but guided, too, by the principles of urbanity and justice. The Garretts of Baltimore were a widely connected, and in numbers an imposing social element, and none of the various daughters of light and loveliness who bore that name more merited consideration in the eyes of manly youth than the capricious, captivating and elusive Sally. Her graces of manner were not less delightful than her conversation was spirited and roguish, and her assumption of a demure simplicity had often driven Alexander Leacraft to the limits of his English matter-of-fact credulity in explaining to her the relations of the King to Parliament, or the municipal acreage of the old City of London. All of which information this very well read and much travelled young woman, as might be expected, was possessed of, but just for the purposes of her feminine and cruel fancy, not too well disposed towards her patient suitor, disingenuously concealed. Sally really enjoyed the painstaking gravity with which the young Englishman explained the eternal principles of English rule, and the never-to-be-forgotten superiorities of London.