rt of dream-paradise. The shadow of
the mountains where she was born fell softly, solemnly, over her whole
life; influencing her pursuits, her character, perhaps even her destiny.

Yet there was a curious fascination about Oldchurch. She never
forgot it. The two great wide streets, High-street and Butcher-row,
intersecting one another in the form of a cross: the two churches--the
Old Church, gloomy and Norman, with its ghostly graveyard; and the New
Church, shining white amidst a pleasant garden cemetery, beneath one of
whose flower-beds her baby-brother lay: the two shops, the only ones she
ever visited, the confectioner's, where she stood to watch the yearly
fair, and the bookseller's whither she dragged her nurse on any excuse,
that she might pore over its incalculable treasures.

Above all, there was fixed in her memory the strange aspect the town
wore on one day--a Coronation-day, the grandest gala of her childhood.
One king had died and been buried.--Olive saw the black-hung pulpit and
heard the funeral sermon, awfully thundered forth at night Another king
had been proclaimed, and Olive had gloried in the sight of the bonfires
and the roasted sheep. Now the people talked of a Coronation-day. Simple
child! She knew nothing of the world's events or the world's destinies,
save that she rose early to the sound of carolling bells, was dressed
in a new white frock, and taken to see the town--the beautiful town,
smiling with triumphal flower-arches and winding processions. How she
basked in the merry sunshine, and heard the shouts, and the band playing
"God save the King," and felt very loyal, until her enthusiasm vented
itself in tears.

Such was one of the few links between Olive's early life and the world
outside. Otherwise she dwelt, for those seven years of childhood, in
a little Eden of her own, whose boundary was rarely crossed by the
footsteps of either joy or pain. She was neither neglected nor ill-used,
but she never knew that fulness of love on which one looks back in
after-life, saying deprecatingly, and yet sighing the while, "Ah, I was
indeed a spoiled child!" Her little heart was not positively checked in
its overflowings; but it had a world of secret tenderness, which, being
never claimed, expended itself in all sorts of wild fancies. She loved
every flower of the field and every bird in the air. She also--having
a passionate fondness for study and reading--loved her pet authors and
their characters, wi