Happy lives make dull biographies. Young women with ambitions should be
very cautious lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a
happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.

"Miss Pott--the beautiful Miss Pott," they called her. The biographers
didn't take time to give her first name, nor recount her pedigree, so
rapt were they with her personality. They only say, "She was tall,
willowy and lissome; and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her picture as a
peasant beauty, bearing on her well-poised head a sheaf of corn."

It was at the house of Macklin, the rich publisher, that John Landseer,
the engraver, met Miss Pott. She was artistic in all her instincts; and
as she knew the work of the brilliant engraver and named his best pieces
without hesitation he grew interested. Men grow interested when you know
and appreciate their work; sometimes they grow more interested, at which
time they are also interesting.

And so it came about that they were married, the beautiful Miss Pott and
John Landseer, and it can also be truthfully added that they were happy
ever afterward.

But that was the last of Miss Pott. Her husband was so strong, so
self-centered, so capable, that he protected her from every fierce wind,
and gratified her every wish. She believed in him thoroughly and
conformed her life to his. Her personality was lost in him. The
biographer scarcely refers to her, save when he is obliged to,
indirectly, to record that she became the mother of three fine girls, and
the same number of boys, equally fine, by name, Thomas, Charles and
Edwin.