CHAPTER II.
YOUTH AND MARRIAGE.
Whatever accomplishments Susanna Annesley may have lacked, she was perfect mistress of English undefiled, had a ready flow of words, an abundance of common sense, and that gift of letter-writing which is supposed to have vanished out of the world at the introduction of the Penny Post. She probably had sufficient acquaintance with the French language to enable her to read easy authors; but at an age when a girl of her years and capacity ought to have been reading literature, she appears to have been studying the religious questions of the day. It is true that they were uppermost in all minds, but it is equally true that her father, Dr. Annesley, had laid controversy aside and did not add a single pamphlet to the vast army of them which invaded the world at that epoch. He was a liberal and a large-minded man, and no stronger proof of it can be adduced than that his youngest daughter, before she was thirteen, was allowed so much liberty of conscience, that she deliberately chose and preferred attaching herself to the Church of England rather than remaining among the Nonconformists, with whom her father had cast in his lot.
