gnes is gone."

Sinsie was four and a half; she had "talked plain" ever since she
was one; and the nonsense that her mother had talked to her being
always bright nonsense, such as she would talk to anybody on the
same subject, there was something quaint in the child's fashion of
speech and her unexpected use of words. Asenath Scherman did not
keep two dictionaries, nor pare off an idea, as she would a bit of
apple before she gave it to a child. It was noticeable how she
sharpened their little wits continually against her own without
straining them.

And there was a reflex action to this sharpening. She was fuller of
graceful little whims, of quick and keen illustrations, than ever.
Her friends who were admitted to nursery intimacies and nursery
talk, said it was ever so much better than any grown-up
dinner-tables and drawing-rooms.

"Well," she would answer, "I'm not much in the way of dinner-tables
and drawing-rooms. I just have to live right along, and what there
is of me comes out here. I rather think we'll save time and comfort
by it in the end,--Sinsie and I. She won't want so much special
taking into society by and by, before she can learn to tell one
thing from another. Frank and I, with such friends as come here in
our own fashion, will make a society for her from the beginning, as
well as we can. She will get more from us in twenty years than she
would from 'society' in two. And if I 'kept up' outside, now, for
the sake of her future, that would be the alternative? I believe
more in growing up than in coming out."

If there was a reflex action in the mental influence, how much more
in the tender and spiritual! How many a word came back into her own
heart like a dove, that she first thought of in giving it to her
child!

She sat now in her chamber bathing and dressing baby Karen; and all
the perplexities of the day,--the days or weeks, perhaps,--that had
stretched out before her, melted into a sweetness, remembering that
she herself was but one of God's sparrows, fed out of his hand; and
that all her limitations, as well as her unsuspected safeties, were
the fine wires with which He surrounded and held her in.

"He knows my cage," she thought. "He has put me here Himself, and He
will not forget me."

Frank dined down town; Asenath had her lunch of bread and butter,
and beef tea; and an egg beaten in a tumbler, with sugar and cream,
for her dessert. The children, with their biscuit and milk and baked
a