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 birth to perpetually varying conjectures. in her presence, which were followed by the most eccentric assertions where she was the subject of discourse in her absence. All that already had been spread abroad, of her acting, her teaching, her playing the harp, her needle-work, and, more than all, her having excited a suicide; was now in every mouth, and curiosity, baffled in successive attempts to penetrate into the truth, supplied, as usual, every chasm of fact by invention.

This species of commerce, always at hand, and always fertile, proved so highly amusing to the lassitude of the idle, and to the frivolousness of the dissipated, that, in a very few days, the shop of Miss Matson became the general rendezvous of the saunterers, male and female, of Brighthelmstone. The starers were happy to present themselves where there was something to see; the strollers, where there was any where to go, the loungers, where there was any pretence to stay; and the curious where there was any