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of being the most beautiful woman in the State, if indeed she was surpassed anywhere. Her mind was as rich in its stores and resources as her person was in feminine graces. Her life up to that time had been a checkered, and in the main, a very unhappy one, for her refinement, nature, education, character and acquirements, were such as to demand a broader, higher, better social sphere than what, from pecuniary want, she now occupied and moved in. Another cause of unrest was that she was maritally mismatched altogether, for her husband, after years of absence, during which she had deemed him dead, and contracted a second alliance with the father of her boy, had suddenly returned, and never from that moment did she receive one particle of what her heart yearned for—that domestic love and sympathy, ever the matron’s due, and which alone can render life a blessing, and smooth the rugged, thorny pathway to the tomb. Flora Beverly claimed immediate kindred with the red-skinned sons of the northern wilderness, but that blood in her veins mingled with the finer current derived from her ancestor, the Cid —a strain of royal blood that in the foretime had nerved noble-souled men to deeds of valor, and fired the souls of Spanish poets to lofty achievements in the rosy fields of immortal song. She had been tenderly reared—perhaps too much so—for her strange and wonderful