Then she came in with a rush, and, demonstrative toad, embraced Mrs.
Dodd's knees, and owned she had cultivated her geraniums with all those
medicines, liquid and solid; and only one geranium had died.


There is a fascinating age, when an intelligent girl is said to fluctuate
between childhood and womanhood. Let me add that these seeming
fluctuations depend much on the company she is in: the budding virgin is
princess of chameleons; and, to confine ourselves to her two most piquant
contrasts, by her mother's side she is always more or less childlike;
but, let a nice young fellow engage her apart, and, hey presto! she shall
be every inch a woman: perhaps at no period of her life are the purely
mental characteristics of her sex so supreme in her; thus her type, the
rosebud, excels in essence of rosehood the rose itself.

My reader has seen Julia Dodd play both parts; but it is her child's face
she has now been turning for several pages; so it may be prudent to
remind him she has shone on Alfred Hardie in but one light; a young but
Juno-like woman. Had she shown "my puppy" her childish qualities, he
would have despised her--he had left that department himself so recently.
But Nature guarded the budding fair from such a disaster.

We left Alfred Hardie standing in the moonlight gazing at her lodging.
This was sudden; but, let slow coaches deny it as loudly as they like,
fast coaches exist; and Love is a Passion, which, like Hate, Envy,
Avarice, &c., has risen to a great height in a single day. Not that
Alfred's was "Love at first sight;" for he had seen her beauty in the
full blaze of day with no deeper feeling than admiration; but in the
moonlight he came under more sovereign spells than a fair face: her
virtues and her voice. The narrative of their meeting has indicated the