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 *nence that flourishes most in dowagers. The time this manœuvre took gave me the necessary moment to recover myself. I seized it, smiled on my aunt's bland insolence and said:

"My dear aunt, permit me to present to you Miss Prudence Canticle, that very familiar and dear friend of mine of whom you have heard me so often speak. She shares all the secrets of my bosom, and I therefore, my dear aunt, commend her with the more confidence to yours."

"I am charmed, I am delighted, I am sure," says the dowager, sweeping a stately bow upon the phrase with great majesty.

"Madam," says the lad, "I am infarnally glad of your acquaintancy."

My aunt, the dowager, was a person of too much breeding to express or to otherwise betray any astonishment at this; but I am sure she felt it, for though she had never seen Prue, my pious friend in propria persona, she had seen her letters, and on the strength of those epistles had held her image up before me as a paragon of gentlewomen and a mirror of the Christian virtues. I dare not look at my aunt's stern mien lest I broke out in a peal of laughter; but the lad, with a slight curl at his lips, and a saucy gleam within his eye, met full the shock of it, and quailed not.

"'Tis strange, my dear Miss Canticle," says my aunt with that sugared fluency in which she wrapped her sourest moods, "that I had no premonition of your coming. Barbara gives me not a