Though they had ever been in habits of constant intimacy, taught to view each other in the light of brother and sister, and mingling freely for years in every sport of their childhood, yet a year or two having almost magically brought Eliza to womanhood, she began to feel a strange restraint in the company of Charles, which the presence of no one else produced. As rapidly as the sweet accents might be falling from her active tongue, his entrance hushed them completely; and even he would _labor_ for some time, through a few short sentences. Yet notwithstanding these unusual effects, each felt that the cause which produced them was not unwelcomed; and when _plagued about it_, (as the phrase is) the crimson blush that mantled their burning cheeks, indicated too clearly where arose this sudden alteration in their deportment towards each other,--what had put an end to all the little familiarities before so frequent. Gradually, however, would the leaden weight fall from Charles' tongue; and as he would relate to the company in most graphic and thrilling terms his dangerous pursuit of the fierce panther or infuriated wolf, following them into the most retired recesses, encountering them in their darkest caverns, and drawing them forth dead, to the astonishment of his less venturesome associates,--or his "hair breadth escapes" in wresting from the infuriated she-bear her whelps, the very great interest vividly manifest in Eliza's countenance, the breathless attention with which she hung upon every word and caught each syllable as it fell from his lips, and the quickly averted glance, her color slightly heightening as he _frequently_ directed his eye towards her, soon convinced Charles that he was the object of something more than an ordinary regard in her bosom; nay, that he had actually won her affections. As for himself he had long since been enthralled; nor could it be otherwise. There is in every bosom, susceptibilities for all the emotions; and so soon as causes calculated to excite them are presented, quick as an electric flash the emotions succeed. Thus in love, there is a susceptibility in every mind to be pleased with certain virtues or actions; and when we perceive them, it is as impossible not to admire them as to believe that they have never existed. And when a combination of such qualities without a blemish is discovered in any person, he had as well try to drive back the current of the Mississippi as to resist the inevitable consequence. The emotion of _love_ involuntarily arises; he _must_ love, for such is his mental constitution; the feeling becomes a part of himself; he had no agency in effecting it; he feels not, nor can he feel a disposition to divest himself of it. Circumstances may induce him to check it, to trample it down, to clip each bud as it appears, but he can never extinguish it; he cannot destroy it. But let him give himself up to be bound in its pleasant fetters; let him suffer it to sway an undivided