MARY AND FLORENCE AT SIXTEEN. A Continuation of “Grave and Gay." CHAPTER I. SOME of my young friends have expressed a wish to hear more of Mary and Florence, and one little lady in particular is anxious to know what they did when they grew up to sixteen. It would, perhaps, be beginning well to say, that they were then tall, graceful girls, just verging into womanhood, but it was not so; they were still little, had scarce attained the middle height; yet they were graceful in no ordinary degree, and with minds highly cultivated and much useful in B formation, they retained, in a great measure, the simplicity of their earlier years, and their manners were perfectly natural and unaffected. But at sixteen the lives of Mary and Florence seemed to give promise of a somewhat chequered scene; in the years which had passed away, Mr. Percy had enjoyed many blessings and had experienced also some privations; he had been made happy by the birth of a little boy, who, now just entering his fourth year, was the pet and plaything of the whole house, and he had, within a few months previous to the present period, been deprived, by the sudden failure of a mercantile house, of a considerable part of that fortune which would have made this child independent; but Mr. Percy was one of those who would have esteemed mere pecuniary independence for his son but a doubtful blessing; and in giving him a liberal education, and habits of regular active industry, he felt he should still bequeath to him the richest inheritance he could ever have bestowed. With some necessary retrenchments and a strict regard to economy, enough, he hoped, still remained for this, and every essential comfort; but in the extreme delicacy of Mrs. Percy's health he felt a far greater source of anxiety; without any formed complaint, and with the assurance of his medical attendants that there was nothing essentially wrong, there was yet such a look of languor as gave Mr. Percy many an anxious hour; and it had been determined, chiefly on account of Mrs. Percy's health, but also for the sake of the necessary retrenchments, that the Priory should be let for some time, and that the family should spend the ensuing winter in the south of France, and the summer in Switzerland. The girls were present when this arrangement was made; they were now fitted both by nature and by cultivation to be the friends and companions of their parents, and the decision was listened to by them with feelings strongly characteristic of their different dispositions. Mary's quiet, steady judgment fully approved of the measure, but still she acutely felt that she was about to leave the happy home of her childhood, that the flowers she had planted would be gathered by other hands, the birds she had reared be dependent on the care of strangers, and above all, that many an humble heart around would be well nigh broken by such a parting. Florence, quite as affectionate and with feelings fully as acute, was still apt to be carried away by the impulse of the moment: she only saw before her the flowery fields of Provence, and already was bounding in imagination over plains of the almond tree, the fig, and the olive. "O Mary!" she exclaimed, the moment they were alone, "is it not delightful? think, only think of our witnessing the setting suns of Languedoc! think of our gazing upon Mont Blanc, and rambling amidst the Pyrenees." "Yes," answered her sister, (catching part of Florence's enthusiasm, and her colour deepening as she spoke,)—" yes, Florence, it will be indeed delightful, we shall visit the land of the Troubadours, the land of the minstrel and the song; and," she continued, and the bright beam left her sweet countenance, we take with us those that are 66 |