Laura Spencer Portor

“ I have seen the most beautiful of our own species—our women—bedeck themselves in an expensive but poor imitation of this spangled beauty, that is but the common daily garb of these. And I have seen them drift, in the arms of men of a not too high order, in "swallow-tails," to the rhythms of a labored and contrived music, in the making of which musicians, for the most part, get red in the face and break many a fiddle string. ”

“ I saw this one then snap the hitching chain to make sure of the creature's waiting. And there, incomparable, it waited until the groom, much elated with the company he had enjoyed, came out again, and with scarcely any guiding of the reins, but much wabbling of the head, allowed this marvel of power and beauty and sagacity to take him safely home. ”

“ I have often wondered at the maintained smoothness and the immitigable severity of that extreme beauty of order in which the birds go clothed, which nothing successfully as sails, and which not even the driven storms of the heavens can disarrange ”