CHAPTER III.
_THE SISTER_.
Grace Seymour was a specimen of a class of whom we are happy to say New England possesses a great many.
She was a highly cultivated, intelligent, and refined woman, arrived at the full age of mature womanhood unmarried, and with no present thought or prospect of marriage.

I presume all my readers, who are in a position to run over the society of our rural New-England towns, can recall to their minds hundreds of such.

They are women too thoughtful, too conscientious, too delicate, to marry for any thing but a purely personal affection; and this affection, for various reasons, has not fallen in their way.
The tendency of life in these towns is to throw the young men of the place into distant fields of adventure and enterprise in the far Western and Southern States, leaving at their old homes a population in which the feminine element largely predominates.

It is not, generally speaking, the most cultivated or the most attractive of the brethren who remain in the place where they were born.

The ardent, the daring, the enterprising, are off to the ends of the earth; and the choice of the sisters who remain at home is, therefore, confined to a restricted list; and so it ends in these delightful rose-gardens of single women which abound in New England,--women who remain at home as housekeepers to aged parents, and charming persons in society; women over whose graces of conversation and manner the married men in their vicinity go off into raptures of eulogium, which generally end with, "Why hasn't that woman ever got married ?" It often happens to such women to expend on some brother that stock of hero-worship and devotion which it has not come in their way to give to a nearer friend.