this matter has
sent many a young person to Bedlam, whose nature would have opened kindly
enough if it had only been trusted to the sweet influences of morning
sunshine. In such cases it may be that the state we call insanity is not
always an unalloyed evil. It may take the place of something worse, the
wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the perpetual
interferences of another mind governed by laws alien and hostile to its
own. Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left to Nature in this
extremity. But before she comes to that, she has many expedients. The
mind does not know what diet it can feed on until it has been brought to
the starvation point. Its experience is like that of those who have been
long drifting about on rafts or in long-boats. There is nothing out of
which it will not contrive to get some sustenance. A person of note,
long held captive for a political offence, is said to have owed the
preservation of his reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to get
exercise and excitement by throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor
of his dungeon, and then hunting for it in a series of systematic
explorations until he had found it.

Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would have
been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if Providence, which
in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected agencies, had not made a
special provision for her mental welfare. She was in that arid household
as the prophet in the land where there was no dew nor rain for these long
years. But as he had the brook Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the
morning and the bread and flesh in the evening which the ravens brought
him, so she had the river and her secret store of books.

The river was light and life and music and companionship to her. She
learned to row herself about upon it, to swim boldly in it, for it had
sheltered nooks but a little way above The Poplars. But there was more
than that in it,--it was infinitely sympathetic. A river is strangely
like a human soul. It has its dark and bright days, its troubles from
within, and its disturbances from without. It often runs over ragged
rocks with a smooth surface, and is vexed with ripples as it slides over
sands that are level as a floor. It betrays its various moods by aspects
which are the commonplaces of poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles
and frowns. Its face is full of winking eyes, when t