he study-table; but still
this removed somewhat of the painful shyness and uncomfortableness from
every body, and especially from Mr. Cardross. He sat himself down in
his familiar arm-chair, and looked across the table at his poor little
pupil, who seemed at once so helpless and so strong.

Lessons begun. The child was exceedingly intelligent--precociously,
nay, preternaturally so, it appeared to Mr. Cardross, who, like many
another learned father, had been blessed with rather stupid boys, who
liked any thing better than study, and whom he had with great labor
dragged through a course of ordinary English, Latin, and even a fragment
of Greek. But this boy seemed all brains. His cheeks flushed, his eyes
glittered, he learned as if he actually enjoyed learning. True, as Mr.
Cardross soon discovered, his acquirements were not at all in the
regular routine of education; he was greatly at fault in many simple
things; but the amount of heterogeneous and out-of-the-way knowledge
which he had gathered up, from all available sources, was quite
marvelous. And, above all, to teach a boy unto whom learning seemed a
pleasure rather than a torment, a favor instead of a punishment, was
such an exceeding and novel delight to the good minister, that soon he
forgot the crippled figure--the helpless hands that sometimes with
fingers, sometimes even with teeth, painfully guided the ingeniously cut
forked stick, and the thin face that only too often turned white and
weary, but quickly looked up, as if struggling against weakness, and
concentrating all attention on the work that was to be done.

At twelve o'clock Helen came in with her father's lunch--a foaming
glass of new milk, warm from the cow. The little earl looked at it with
eager eyes.

"Will I bring you one too?" said Helen.

"Oh--thank you; I am so thirsty. And, please, would you move me a
little--just a very little; I don't often sit so long in one
position. It won't trouble you very much, will it?"

"Not at all, if you will only show me how," stammered Helen, turning hot
and red. But, shaking off her hesitation, she lifted up the poor child
tenderly and carefully, shook his pillows and "sorted" him according to
her own untranslatable Scotch word, then went quickly out of the room to
compose herself, for she had done it all, trembling exceedingly the
while. And yet, somehow, a feeling of great tenderness--tenderer
than even she had felt successively toward her own