traps for husbands. Poor mothers! how often are they charged with
this sin when their honest desires go no further than that their
bairns may be "respectit like the lave." And then she feared
flirtations; flirtations that should be that and nothing more,
flirtations that are so destructive of the heart's sweetest essence.
She feared love also, though she longed for that as well as feared
it;--for her girls, I mean; all such feelings for herself were long
laid under ground;--and then, like a timid creature as she was, she
had other indefinite fears, and among them a great fear that those
girls of hers would be left husbandless,--a phase of life which
after her twelve years of bliss she regarded as anything but
desirable. But the upshot was,--the upshot of so many fears and
such small means,--that Hetta and Susan Bell had but a dull life of
it.

Were it not that I am somewhat closely restricted in the number of
my pages, I would describe at full the merits and beauties of Hetta
and Susan Bell. As it is I can but say a few words. At our period
of their lives Hetta was nearly one-and-twenty, and Susan was just
nineteen. Hetta was a short, plump, demure young woman, with the
softest smoothed hair, and the brownest brightest eyes. She was
very useful in the house, good at corn cakes, and thought much,
particularly in these latter months, of her religious duties. Her
sister in the privacy of their own little room would sometimes twit
her with the admiring patience with which she would listen to the
lengthened eloquence of Mr. Phineas Beckard, the Baptist minister.
Now Mr. Phineas Beckard was a bachelor.

Susan was not so good a girl in the kitchen or about the house as
was her sister; but she was bright in the parlour, and if that