onged himself, but thought it very
shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with foreboding looks
and dreary death-bed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live
through it. It saddened her early years, of course,--it distressed
her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in,
should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the
natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse,
to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of
All has strewed its downward path.

The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the
best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious
students of science.

Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin
tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother
of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily
nourished, as such people are,--a quality which is inestimable in a
tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough
vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight
her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from
her other parent.

--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It
seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another
blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is represented in
the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original
line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a loss of vitality
hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable
intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.

So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental
probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical
learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like
her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction
of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines
of objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary
horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to
Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a