Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and plaintive breathings. It was a great expense to bring it out from London, but Hugh shared all with papa, for it was their joint gift to grandmamma. Hugh is so fond of all our family, I think he would give his estate to us if he could; but then he has no other intimate friends, for he is an only child and an orphan. Grandmamma says we must wait till the lady of his love makes her appearance, and then we shall not come so well off for attention. It is something heavenly to sit and hear her strains of sacred music as night falls gently on the land. Aunt Ellie says it is like conversing with the angels, and it really seems as if the angel of the night were whispering to us, as those sweet and mellow tones sigh themselves out into the moonlit air. I found Hugh at grandmamma’s. He remained to dinner with us. After he was gone, aunt Ellie was loud in his praise; and grandmamma observed that he was one in a thousand, and that the other young men of our acquaintance were not fit to hold a candle to him; and then aunt Ellie interrupted her, saying,
Don’t you let him slip out of your hands, Doss. Nor was this all, for after remaining silent for a moment, she added, You must not let Lucille win the prize. Aunt Ellie I knew was only joking, and yet I got into a great passion, and said she had no right whatever to talk about me in that way in connexion with Hugh, and that Lucille, the eldest of us all, was more fitted for a man of his age than I was?‘ a mere child. Grandmamma fired up at this remark, and said I had no business to talk to my aunt in this uppish style; that Hugh would be a fool to think of a little chit like me, who had no control over herself in any way. Aunt Ellie, one of the sweetest and gentlest of human beings, seemed very much surprised at t…
