considerable knowledge, and great integrity of intention, became
acquainted, and by a variety of motives was prompted to pay her his
addresses.

No people are so certain of the happiness of a state of wedlock as a
couple courting. Some difference however must be made, between lovers
who have never married, and lovers who, having made the experiment,
find it possible that a drop of gall may now and then embitter the
cup of honey. My aunt's first husband had been a man of an easy
disposition, and readily swayed to good or ill. She had seldom
suffered contradiction from him, or heard reproach. A kind of good
humoured indolence had accustomed him rather to ward off accusation
with banter, or to be silent under it, than to contend. His
extravagance had obliged her to study the strictest economy; she,
therefore, was the ostensible person; she regulated, she corrected,
she complained. She had a tincture of the rector in her composition,
and her husband's follies afforded sufficient opportunities for the
exercise of her office.

After his death, which happened early, the wrecks of his originally
small fortune, scarcely afforded her subsistence for a year. By
many humble but grating concessions on her part, and no less proud
upbraidings on the part of her father, she was first allowed a
trifling annuity, almost too scanty to afford the means of life, and,
as it were in resentment to the unpardonable conduct of my mother, was
afterward permitted to return to the parsonage house.

The state of subjection in which she was kept, the dissatisfaction
this evidently created, the gloom that was visible in her countenance,
and that seemed to oppress her heart, added to a disconsolate and