nough. Her incessant tears spoilt
her thread, and Mrs. Kelland decided that "she'd never get her bread
till she was broke of her buke;" which breaking was attempted by a
summary pawning of all poor Lovedy's reward books. The poor child
confided her loss to her young lady teacher at the Sunday school; the
young lady, being new, young, and inflammable, reproached Mrs. Kelland
with dishonesty and tyranny to the orphan, and in return was nearly
frightened out of her wits by such a scolding as only such a woman as
the lace mistress could deliver. Then Mr. Touchett tried his hand, and
though he did not meet with quite so much violence, all he heard was
that she had "given Lovedy the stick for being such a little tod as to
complain, when she knew the money for the bukes was put safe away in
her money-box. She was not going to the Sunday schule again, not she,
to tell stories against her best friends!" And when the next district
visitor came that way, the door was shut in her face, with the tract
thrown out at the opening, and an intimation in Mrs. Kelland's shrill
voice, that no more bukes were wanted; she got plenty from Miss Curtis.

These bukes from Miss Curtis were sanatory tracts, which Rachel was
constantly bestowing, and which on Sundays Mrs. Kelland spelt through,
with her finger under the line, in happy ignorance whether the subject
were temporal or spiritual, and feeling herself in the exemplary
discharge of a Sunday duty. Moreover, old feudal feeling made Rachel
be unmolested when she came down twice a week, opened the door of
the blackhole under the stairs, and read aloud something religious,
something improving, and a bit of a story, following it up by mental
arithmetic and a lesson on objects, which seemed to Mrs. Kelland the
most arrant nonsense in the world, and to her well-broken scholars was
about as interesting as the humming of a blue-bottle fly; but it was
poor Lovedy's one enjoyment, though making such havoc of her work that
it was always expiated by extra hours, not on her pillow, but at it.

These visits of Rachel were considered to encourage the Kelland
refractoriness, and it was officially intimated that it would be wise to
discontinue them, and that "it was thought better" to withdraw from Mrs.
Kelland all that direct patronage of her trade, by which the ladies
had enabled her to be in some degree independent of the middle-men,
who absorbed so much of the profit from the workers. Grace and Rachel,
s