Some nights afterwards, I accompanied my aunt to the house of Mrs Ball, also a neighbour, and one who could afford to live in a style that, in such a town as Stirling, might be conceived to be high. She had a daughter, Anne, and a son, George, an attorney, both accomplished and handsome, and wearing on their faces the external appearances of simplicity and goodness. The recollections of Semple's family were still busy with my heart, and I trembled to approach another assemblage of fashionable people. I was placed in the midst of a large tea _coterie_, and expected to hear a conversation suited to the views of human life I so fondly cherished. Stories of generosity, of age assuaged, bereavement ameliorated, want supplied, and hunger and nakedness fed and clothed, must, I thought, issue from such a quiet-looking assemblage of people, brought together apparently for no other purpose than to promote the cause of their own happiness, which surely might be best done by contemplating the means of the happiness of others. Having had one of my fits in the fore part of the day, I was more irritable than usual; but having got, in some measure, quit of the pain produced by the moral discordance that had, some days before, grated so painfully on my weak nerves, I expected to be able to join in a conversation which could not fail to embrace a part of my favourite theme. I was again destined to be made miserable. I was placed in the midst of a species of moral cannibals, who preyed ruthlessly and jestingly on the misfortunes and miseries of their fellow-creatures. Pecuniary embarrassments, matrimonial disagreements, detections of dishonesty, elopements, infidelities--everything that might render an individual worthy of pity or hatred--was treated in the same tone of concealed satisfaction. The burst of loud laughter followed on the heels of the whine of hollow sympathy; the sneer mixed its cutting sarcasm with the lying tribute to suffering worth; and through all, over all, in all, there was the spirit of evil, in its worst, its ugliest form, rejoicing--secretly, no doubt, but not the less certainly--in the defection of mortals from God's law, and their devarication from my standard of moral beauty.