Two other ladies only (although the number of lady passengers was nearly forty) appear to have attached themselves to the Captain's party. They were both spinsters, Miss Perkins and Miss Wiseman. These two girls were certainly to be commiserated, inasmuch as they had gone out to friends or relatives in India in the hope of exchanging their maiden names for some others, and had not succeeded in effecting this much-coveted exchange. Their temporary protectors having been removed by death, sickness, war, or other unhappy causes, nothing remained for them but to return to the land from whence they came. Under such circumstances it is not wonderful that an air of disappointment hung over them, and that they sometimes gave utterance to remarks that betrayed the feeling which it would have been wiser to have concealed. How it happened that these young ladies failed to achieve their object I am quite unable to explain; they each of them possessed an average share of good looks and feminine attractions, nor were they destitute of most of those accomplishments in which young ladies strive to shine. They played and sang _a little_; they were grand at croquet, first rate at converting a glass or delft jug into a china vase; did card and shell marks; understood the language of flowers; could talk with their fingers; danced round dances with a constancy and resolution that defied fatigue, exhaustion, or even daylight; and, to crown all, they were proficients in the science of flirtation; they had, in fact, become graduates, by adopting the surest road to perfection; they had gained experience by a most extensive practice, which commenced before they were thirteen years old, and which since then they had never intermitted. With such winning cards in their hand, their failure does seem surprising, and might almost lead us to question the value of the last-mentioned accomplishment, and to ask whether, independent of the case-hardening of all young, fresh, and genuine feeling, it may not lead those who resort to it to become on all occasions more or less deceitful; and whether it may not sometimes recoil on the practitioner by teaching the opposite party to practise equal deceit. I leave these questions to be debated and considered by those whom it most concerns. I would only protest against any argument being deduced from the wide adoption of the practice.