It is a melancholy but indisputable fact, that even in the most religious and moral country in the world, the bulwark of evangelical faith, and the home of the domestic virtues (meaning, of course, England), a great many mothers who have daughters to marry, are not so anxious about the real welfare, temporal and eternal, of their young ladies, as solicitous that they should acquire riches, titles, and other vanities of the world,--nay, that many of the daughters themselves act as if their everlasting happiness depended on their securing in matrimony a proper combination of the aforesaid vanities, and put out of account altogether the greatest prize a woman can gain--the possession of a true and loving heart, joined to a wise head. Now, Ashburner being a very good _parti_ at home, and having run the gauntlet of one or two London seasons, had become very skittish of mammas, and still more so of daughters. He regarded the unmarried female as a most dangerous and altogether to be avoided animal, and when you offered to introduce him to a young lady, looked about as grateful as if you had invited him to go up in a balloon. He expected to be rather more persecuted, if any thing, in America than he had been at home; and when he met Miss Vanderlyn at Ravenswood, if his first thought had found articulate expression, it would probably have been something like this:--"Now that young woman is going to set her cap at me; what a bore it will be!" Never was a man more mistaken in his anticipations. He encountered many pretty girls, not at all timid, ready enough to talk, and flirty enough among their own set, but not one of them threw herself at him, and least of all did Miss Vanderlyn. Not that the young lady was the victim of a romantic attachment, for she was perfectly fancy free and heart whole; nor, on the other hand, that she was at all insensible to the advantages of matrimony, for she kept a very fair lookout in that direction, and had, if not absolutely down on her books, at least engraved on the recording tablets of her mind, four distinct young gentlemen, combining the proper requisites, any of whom would suit her pretty well, and one of whom--she didn't much care which--she was pretty well resolved to marry within the next two years. And as she was stylish and rather handsome, clever enough, and tolerably provided with the root of all evil, besides having that fortunate good humor and accommodating disposition which go so far towards making a woman a belle and a favorite, there was a sufficient probability that before the expiration of that time, one of the four would offer himself. But all her calculations were founded on shrewd common sense; her imagination took no flights, and her aspirations only extended to the ordinary and possible. That this young and strange Englishman, travelling as a part of education, the son of a great man, and probably betrothed by proxy to some great man's daughter, or going