The eyes of the father followed her with a look of grave, thoughtful, intense affection. The mother's eyes looked up to him, and then glanced onward to the child. She was between nine and ten years old--not very handsome, for it is not a handsome age. Yet there were indications of future beauty--fine and sparkling eyes, rich, waving, silky hair, long eyelashes, a fine complexion, a light and graceful figure, though deformed by the stiff fashions of the day. There was a sparkle too in her look--that bright outpouring of the heart upon the face which is one of the most powerful charms of youth and innocence. Ah! how soon gone by! How soon checked by the thousand loads which this heavy laboring world casts upon the buoyancy of youthful spirits--the chilling conventionality--the knowledge, and the fear of wrong--the first taste of sorrow--the anxieties, cares, fears--even the hopes of mature life, are all weights to bear down the pinions of young, lark-like joy. After twenty, does the heart ever rise up from her green sod and sing at Heaven's gate as in childhood? Never--ah, never! The dust of earth is upon the wing of the sky songster, and will never let her mount to her ancient pitch. That child was a strange combination of her father and her mother. She was destined to be their only one; and it seemed as if nature had taken a pleasure in blending the characters of both in one. Not that they were intimately mingled, but that they seemed like the twins of Laconia, to rise and set by turns. In her morning walk; in her hours of sportive play; when no subject of deep thought, no matter that affected the heart or the imagination was presented to her, she was light and gay as a butterfly; the child--the happy child was in every look, and word, and movement. But call her for a moment from this bright land of pleasantness--present something to her mind or to her fancy which rouses sympathies, or sets the energetic thoughts at work, and she was grave, meditative, studious, deep beyond her years. She was a subject of much contemplation, some anxiety, some wonder to her father. The brightness of her perceptions, her eagerness in the pursuit of knowledge, her vigorous resolution even as a child, when convinced that she was right, showed him his own mind reflected in hers. Even her tenderness, her strong affections, he could comprehend; for the same were in his own heart, and though he believed them to be weaknesses, he could well understand their existence in a child and in a woman. But that which he did not understand--that which made him marvel--was her lightness, her gayety, her wild vivacity--I might almost say, her trifling, when not moved by deep feeling or chained down by thought.