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THE MOTH FLIES INTO THE CANDLE.
The invitation which Mr.Bernard Langdon had accepted came from the Board of Trustees of the "Apollinean Female Institute," a school for the education of young ladies, situated in the flourishing town of Rockland.
This was an establishment on a considerable scale, in which a hundred scholars or thereabouts were taught the ordinary English branches, several of the modern languages, something of Latin, if desired, with a little natural philosophy, metaphysics, and rhetoric, to finish off with in the last year, and music at any time when they would pay for it.

At the close of their career in the Institute, they were submitted to a grand public examination, and received diplomas tied in blue ribbons, which proclaimed them with a great flourish of capitals to be graduates of the Apollinean Female Institute.
Rockland was a town of no inconsiderable pretensions.

It was ennobled by lying at the foot of a mountain,--called by the working-folks of the place "the Maounting,"-- which sufficiently showed that it was the principal high land of the district in which it was situated.

It lay to the south of this, and basked in the sunshine as Italy stretches herself before the Alps.