to show that I have not spent the whole day reading." Again she confesses to completing two thick volumes entitled "The Victim of Magical Illusions; or the Mystery of the Revolution of P— L—," which claimed to be a "magico-political tale, founded on historic fact." "It may seem strange," she muses, "that I should begin the year, reading romances. 'T is a practice I by no means highly approve, yet I trust I have not sinned, as I read a little of most things."
She does indeed, for we find her after a time dipping into—of all books in the world—Rabelais, and retiring hastily from the experiment. "I expected something very sensible and clever," she says sadly, "but on looking over the volumes I was ashamed I had sent for them." Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women" pleases her infinitely better; though she is unwilling to go so far as the impetuous Englishwoman, in whom reasonableness was never a predominant trait. Unrestricted freedom, that curbless wandering through doubtful paths which end in social pitfalls, offered no allurement to the
