SWEET COUNSEL: A BOOK FOR GIRLS. CHAPTER I. MY CHILD. Christopher North's imaginary daughter-Mary-the Maiden Aunt-Personal Description of Mary. WHEN Christopher North, in the pages of Blackwood, was a giant in literature, one of his fancies, besides that which constituted him an old man leaning on a crutch, was to imagine himself the father of an only daughter, with whom his happiness was perfect-till her marriage day. In another vision he conjured up the refined, thoughtful, tender widow Mrs Gentle, and her modest, intelligent, glad child Mary. Thenceforth in the sparkling pages of the Noctes, the reader is constantly coming across and welcoming the womanly, pleasant pair, now in the Portobello coach which ran to suit the bathers in those days, now as charmed guests of the wonderful Shep A herd in the dowie dens, and by the birken shaws and the lone lochs of the Forest, now hovering about Christopher's winter chair, gracing his own special snuggery in his imaginary house in Edinburgh. I think it was Beranger who had it gratefully recorded on his aunt's tomb, "She was never a mother, yet sons mourned for her." I, too, can conjure up my child-another Mary, called by that name, fit alike for palace and cottage, bestowed on her who was the blessed among women, awarded also by centuries of error to her who had her blessing at last, though she was a sinner in her day, and had shed more bitter tears than those with which she washed His feet. My Mary has a good right, a double right to the name; for it is that of her grandmother-her cheery, sweet old Grannyand it was that of her Aunt Mary, so true and kind a being, so clever a creature, that I doubt whether any descendant could have come up to her. It might have been my child's mother's name, but I think no. As far as short-sighted eyes could see, her mother would have been called by another name almost as perfect in its way, familiar too in the mouth as household words. In writing a book for girls, it seems a thousand times simpler and easier for me to do it with a girl's shadowy hand in mine, (ah me! what a round, warm hand it should have been to lead me down the hillside of life,) telling her in frankness and confidence, comfortably and cosily, as women old and young can chat together, a few of my convictions on matters that concern her; begging her to listen to me trustfully, patiently, acknowledging that I shall fall into many mistakes, and leaving her at perfect liberty to correct them; promising her as a reward, that, perhaps, she may thus reap some of "the long results of time," by gathering the fruits and escaping the thorns of another's wayfaring, and being a wiser and a better woman than the friend who has gone before her. Now for an idea of the Mary, who is to lay her head against mine, the golden brown or the burnished black beside those dull, white threads which in the meantime are making an iron rather than a silver gray of the heavier, wearier head, who is to believe in me, never to fear me—who is not to suppose she is to make a play-horse of me, or be guilty of the unkind, unwomanly, rude, sometimes base trick of mimicking and ridiculing my middle age weaknesses; but if she mimics me at all, is to do it fairly and fondly to my face; and if she laughs at me at all, is to laugh fearlessly and joyously in my hearing, with me as well as at me. For if the great Napoleon respected the burden on a poor man's back, and turned a giddy foot out of its heed |