heel off one of his boots, and thereby temporarily disabled himself, was lounging about with him, making observations on men, women, and things generally. "You wouldn't think that was only a girl of seventeen," said Harry, as a languishing brunette, with large, liquid black eyes, and a voluptuous figure, glided by them in the waltz. "How soon these Southerners develope into women! They beat the Italians even." "I wonder the young lady has time to grow, she dances so much. I have watched her two or three evenings, and she has never rested a moment except when the music stopped.--Something must suffer, it seems to me. Does her mind develope uniformly with her person? She is a great centre of attraction, I observe; is it only for her beauty and dancing?" "I suppose a beautiful young woman, with fifty or sixty thousand a year, may consider mental accomplishments as superfluous. She knows, perhaps, as much as a Russian woman of five-and-twenty. How much that is, you, who have been on the Continent, know." "Ah, an heiress; acres of cotton-fields, thousands of negroes, and so on." "Exactly. I put the income down at half of what popular report makes it; these southern fortunes are so uncertain: the white part of the property (that is to say, the cotton) varies with the seasons; and the black part takes to itself legs, and runs off occasionally. But, at any rate, there is quite enough to make her a great prize, and an object of admiration and attention to all the little men--not to the old hands, like White and Sumner; they are built up in their own conceit, and wouldn't marry Sam Weller's 'female marchioness,' unless she made love to them first, like one of Knowles's heroines. But the juveniles are crazy about her. Robinson went off more ostentatiously love-sick than a man of his size I ever saw; and Sedley is always chanting her praises--the only man, woman, or child, he was ever known to speak well of. I don't think any of them will catch her. Edwards might dance into her heart, perhaps, if he were a little bigger; but as it is, she will, probably, make happy and rich some one in her own part of the world. She says the young men there suit her better, because they are 'more gentlemanly' than we Northerners." "I have heard many strangers say the same thing," said Ashburner, prudently refraining from expressing any opinion of his own for he knew Benson's anti-southern feelings.