ident with a loving pleasure. How happy this
young couple had been, what plans and projects of improvement they had
formed, how they lived in each other, always together, so young and fresh
and beautiful as she remembered them in that one early summer when they
walked arm in arm through the wilderness of roses that ran riot in the
garden,--she told of this as loath to leave it and come to the woe that
lay beneath.

She told the whole story;-shall I repeat it? Not now. If, in the course
of relating the incidents I have undertaken to report, it tells itself,
perhaps this will be better than to run the risk of producing a painful
impression on some of those susceptible readers whom it would be
ill-advised to disturb or excite, when they rather require to be amused
and soothed. In our pictures of life, we must show the flowering-out of
terrible growths which have their roots deep, deep underground. Just how
far we shall lay bare the unseemly roots themselves is a matter of
discretion and taste, and which none of us are infallible.

The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her
peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and
hopes with which her father had watched the course of her development.
She recounted all her strange ways, from the hour when she first tried to
crawl across the carpet, and her father's look as she worked her way
towards him. With the memory of Juliet's nurse she told the story of her
teething, and how, the woman to whose breast she had clung dying suddenly
about that time, they had to struggle hard with the child before she
would learn the accomplishment of feeding with a spoon. And so of her
fierce plays and fiercer disputes with that boy who had been her
companion, and the whole scene of the quarrel when she struck him with
those sharp white teeth, frightening her, old Sophy, almost to death;
for, as she said, the boy would have died, if it hadn't been for the old
Doctor's galloping over as fast as he could gallop and burning the places
right out of his arm. Then came the story of that other incident,
sufficiently alluded to already, which had produced such an ecstasy of
fright and left such a nightmare of apprehension in the household. And so
the old woman came down to this present time. That boy she never loved
nor trusted was grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man, and he was under
their roof. He wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and Elsie hated him