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294 view two accessory personages, "La Toribia," a Zamba domestic, "the key of the house, the right arm of her mistress, the bonne who brought us all up, the cook, the messenger, the huckstress, the washer and ironer, the maid of all work. She died young, nor was her place ever filled, either in the domestic economy or in the heart of my mother, for they were two friends, mistress and maid, two fellow-laborers who discussed together the means of maintaining the family, wrangled, disputed, dissented, and each one then followed her own opinion, both leading to the same end." The other personage was "Na Cleme, the pauper that hung upon the family, for my mother, like the Rigoleta of Sue, who never hoarded anything, had her poor also, whom she helped to live by her scraps." But the family servant and the family pauper, supposed by some to be a witch, and apparently of that opinion herself, must be banished from our pages, although the beneficent relations of the mother to them add another trait to a noble portraiture.

"Our habitation remained as I have described it, until the day when my two elder sisters arrived at the marriageable age, when an interior revolution began which cost two years of debate, and showers of tears to my mother, on finding herself conquered by a new world of ideas, habits, and tastes, which were not those of the colonial existence, of which she was the last and most finished type. The first symptoms of those social revolutions operated by human intelligence in the great foci of civilization are very common and pass unperceived; they extend through the common people, insinuate themselves into ideas, and infiltrate into the customs. The eighteenth century had glittered