elsewhere of the girl pall-bearers being dressed in white and wearing long white veils, as at the funeral of Fanny Durdin in 1812.

Occasionally, as if to prove to us that our dear grandmothers enjoyed themselves, girlish laughter and frolic illuminate the pages of some old record, and we read of merry-makings or love-makings that beguiled the passing hour, as when young Mr. Porter's best man stole away his fair bride, Elizabeth Pitkin, or from a letter of Mrs. Edward Carrington, of Virginia, learn how her sister, Mary Ambler, captivated the learned Chief-Justice Marshall, whose wife she afterwards became.

"Our expectations were raised to the highest pitch, and the little circle of York was on tiptoe on his arrival. Our girls particularly, were emulous who should be the first introduced; it is remarkable that my sister, then only fourteen and diffident beyond all others, de

three times, and had twenty-four children. The baby which Miss Eve helped to carry to its grave in 1772 was born when Colonel Ash was twenty or twenty-one, while Mr. John Morgan Ash, a child of the third marriage, was born early in the present century.

clared that we were giving ourselves useless trouble, for that she, for the first time, had made up her mind to go to the ball (though she had not even been to dancingschool), and was resolved to set her cap at him and eclipse us all. This in the end proved true, and at the first introduction he became devoted to her."

In the diary of Lucinda of Virginia, who writes to her dear Marcia from "Bushfield" and "The Wilderness," we hear of country visits, tea-drinkings, and all the pleasant sociability that belonged to life in the Old Dominion. She wept over "Lady Julia Mandeville," this tender-hearted Lucinda, until her eyes were so red that she was ashamed to see her beaux, and then, although she had "but little time to smart herself," she "craped" her hair, put on a "Great-Coat," and considered herself 'drest." She tells Marcia that one evening she and Milly Washington were "minded to eat" after they had decorously retired to their rooms for the night, and, having taxed their digestions with a dish of bacon and beef, followed by a bowl of sago cream, were about to enter upon the delights of a nocturnal "apple pye," when Mr. Corbin Washing

ton, in his wife's short gown and petticoat, and Mrs. Washington, in her husband's coat, burst in upon the scene and gave the youthful revellers a fine fright, after which they all settled down to enjoy the "apple pye" together. Elsewhere the the same chronicler tells of Mr. Newton having received "his discard" from her cousin Nancy, and, with never a regret for the disappointed lover, gleefully relates that he could not tell the difference between "The Belle's Stratagem" and "The Coun- \ try Cousin" when read in the distracting presence of Miss Nancy. They were sad coquettes in their youth, these fair dames, although they look so demure in their portraits, and proved such exemplary wives and mothers in later years. Duels and despairing lovers seem scarcely to have ruffled the serenity of their lovely countenances, or to have made their hearts beat faster under their stiff bodices. Did they realize, with a wisdom beyond their years, that heart-breaks were not of necessity fatal? Yet how crushed and bruised the poor hearts seemed!

Thomas Jefferson, at the age of nineteen, filled his letters to his friend, John Page, with rhapsodies upon the form and face of his "Belinda," humbly prays for another watch paper cut by her hands, and calls. upon Providence to sustain him through the trial should she refuse him at the next Apollo ball, where he designs putting his fate to the touch. That he lost we know, as Rebecca Burwell, his "Belinda," soon after became the wife of Jacqueline Ambler, of Virginia; and although Jefferson felt, poor lad, that from him the joys of life had fled forever, it was not long before he recovered and became the devoted lover of Martha Skelton, who made Monticello an earthly paradise to her young husband during the brief period of their married life. Another beautiful Miss Burwell, also of Williamsburg, turned the head of an earlier Virginia statesman, Francis Nicholson, who, like an Eastern sultan rather than a Colonial governor, proposed to cut the throats of his rival, of the clergyman who performed the ceremony, and of the justice who issued the license.

"C'est l'amour, c'est l'amour

Qui tourne le monde ronde !"

It seems as if the old couplet had been singing itself down all the years to assure us that these grandmothers and grandfathers of ours, with all their wisdom and sacrifice and devotion to duty, were capable of the same endearing follies that belong to their children of to-day.