to time were like the chips and splinters under the
green wood, when the chill women pretended to make a fire in the best
parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of burning themselves out, hardly
warming, much less kindling, the fore-stick and the back-log.

Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to look
upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet. Its suggestions
betrayed themselves in one of her first movements. Nothing could be
soberer than the cut of the dresses which the propriety of the severe
household had established as the rule of her costume. But the girl was
no sooner out of bed than a passion came over her to see herself in that
less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century
had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She
rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and
neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back
to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many
things untaught. She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty,"
but she could mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions of
feature and form which had made the original of the picture before her
famous. The same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded
neck, the same more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely
shaped arms and hands, and something very like the same features startled
her by their identity in the permanent image of the canvas and the
fleeting one of the mirror.

The world was hers then,--for she had not read romances and love-letters
without finding that beauty governs it in all times and places. Who was
this middle-aged minister that had been hanging round her and talking to
her about heaven, when there was not a single joy of earth that she had
as yet tasted? A man that had been saying all his fine things to Miss
Susan Posey, too, had he, before he had bestowed his attentions on her?
And to a dozen other girls, too, nobody knows who!

The revulsion was a very sadden one. Such changes of feeling are apt to
be sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with, and
Myrtle was not of a temperament or an age to act with much deliberation
where a pique came in to the aid of a resolve. Master Gridley guessed
sagaciously what would be the effect of his revelation, when he told her
of the particular attentions the minister had paid to pret