nch orthodox breed, and
was, moreover, anxious to counteract any possible detriment as to
religious training from contact with the degenerate Louds of
Loudville, had established a strict course of Bible study for her
granddaughter at a very early age. All celestial phenomena were in
consequence transposed into a Biblical key for the child, and she
regarded the heavens swarming with golden stars as a Hebrew child of
a thousand years ago might have done.

She was glad when she came within the radius of a street light from
time to time; they were stationed at wide intervals in that
neighborhood. Soon, however, she reached the factories, when all
mystery and awe, and vague terrors of what beside herself might be
near unrevealed beneath the mighty brooding of the night, were over.
She was, as it were, in the mid-current of the conditions of her own
life and times, and the material force of it swept away all
symbolisms and unstable drift, and left only the bare rocks and
shores of existence. Always when the child had been taken by one of
her elders past the factories, humming like gigantic hives, with
their windows alert with eager eyes of toil, glancing out at her
over bench and machine, Ellen had seen her secretly cherished
imaginings recede into a night of distance like stars, and she had
felt her little footing upon the earth with a shock, and had clung
more closely to the leading hand of love. "That's where your poor
father works," her grandmother would say. "Maybe you'll have to work
there some day," her aunt Eva had said once; and her mother, who had
been with her also, had cried out sharply as if she had been stung,
"I guess that little delicate thing ain't never goin' to work in a
shoe-shop, Eva Loud." And her aunt Eva had laughed, and declared
with emphasis that she guessed there was no need to worry yet
awhile.

"She never shall, while I live," her mother had cried; and then Eva,
coming to her sister's aid against her own suggestion, had declared,
with a vehemence which frightened Ellen, that she would burn the
shop down herself first.

As for Ellen's father, he never at that time dwelt upon the child's
future as much as his wife did, having a masculine sense of the
instability of houses of air which prevented him from entering them
without a shivering of walls and roof into naught but star-mediums
by his downrightness of vision. "Oh, let the child be, can't you,
Fanny?" he said, when his wife speculated whet