for her lesson in ways
that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has
shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps
hear this one which follows more cheerfully. The physician in the
Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow
handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was
the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so
much consequence as the fact that he did at any rate get well.

These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had given
her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just now more
than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms. And so it happened
that, while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and emotional
elements of her nature which responded to the keys he loved to play upon,
the restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the mellow sunshine,
the soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky, had been quietly
doing their work. The color was fast returning to her cheek, and the
discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually resolving themselves
into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health. It
needed but the timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole
programme of her daily mode of being. The word had been spoken. She saw
its truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast
out an unworthy intimate! How hard for any!--but for a girl so young,
and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how cruelly hard!

She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her eyes were fixed
on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting. It was a
very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by
the first emigrant of her race. The legs and arms were curiously turned
in spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half
repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later date,
each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed to
flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of the ugly
creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress,
her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a
bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample
folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other
portrait, which was to