he two. Old Sophy, who used to watch them
with those quick, animal-looking eyes of hers,--she was said to be
the granddaughter of a cannibal chief, and inherited the keen senses
belonging to all creatures which are hunted as game, Old Sophy, who
watched them in their play and their quarrels, always seemed to be more
afraid for the boy than the girl. "Masse Dick! Masse Dick! don' you be
too rough wi' dat gal! She scratch you las' week, 'n' some day she
bite you; 'n' if she bite you, Masse Dick!" Old Sophy nodded her head
ominously, as if she could say a great deal more; while, in grateful
acknowledgment of her caution, Master Dick put his two little fingers
in the angles of his mouth, and his forefingers on his lower eyelids,
drawing upon these features until his expression reminded her of
something she vaguely recollected in her infancy,--the face of
a favorite deity executed in wood by an African artist for her
grandfather, brought over by her mother, and burned when she became a
Christian.

These two wild children had much in common. They loved to ramble
together, to build huts, to climb trees for nests, to ride the colts,
to dance, to race, and to play at boys' rude games as if both were boys.
But wherever two natures have a great deal in common, the conditions of
a first-rate quarrel are furnished ready-made. Relations are very apt to
hate each other just because they are too much alike. It is so frightful
to be in an atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies; to see all the
hereditary uncomeliness or infirmity of body, all the defects of speech,
all the failings of temper, intensified by concentration, so that every
fault of our own finds itself multiplied by reflections, like our images
in a saloon lined with mirrors! Nature knows what she is about. The
centrifugal principle which grows out of the antipathy of like to like
is only the repetition in character of the arrangement we see expressed
materially in certain seed-capsules, which burst and throw the seed to
all points of the compass. A house is a large pod with a human germ
or two in each of its cells or chambers; it opens by dehiscence of the
front-door by and by, and projects one of its germs to Kansas, another
to San Francisco, another to Chicago, and so on; and this that Smith may
not be Smithed to death and Brown may not be Browned into a mad-house,
but mix in with the world again and struggle back to average humanity.

Elsie's father, whose fault was to ind