assuming earthly substance? Do we not recognize, in that fair woman's
face, a model of features which still beam, at happy meets, on what was
then the woodland pathway, but has out since grown into a busy street?

"This is too ridiculous!--positively insufferable!" mutters the same
critic who had before expressed his disapprobation. "Here is a
pasteboard figure, such as a child would cut out of a card, with a pair
of very dull scissors; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it
the prototype of hereditary beauty!"

"But, sir, you have not the proper point of view," remarks the showman.
"You sit altogether too near to get the best effect of my pictorial
exhibition. Pray, oblige me by removing to this other bench, and I
venture assure you the proper light and shadow will transform the
spectacle into quite another thing."

"Pshaw!" replies the critic; "I want no other light and shade. I have
already told you that it is my business to see things just as they are."

"I would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibition," observes a
gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much interested,--"I
would suggest that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor Endicott, and
who came with him from England, left no posterity; and that,
consequently, we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any
specimens of feminine loveliness now extant among us."

Having nothing to allege against this genealogical objection, the showman
points again to the scene.

During this little interruption, you perceive that the Anglo-Saxon