y fond of wearing pretty things. 'How much bread
for poor starving people would the price of your new bonnet buy, mother?
I should so like to work it out on my little slate!'

Then she would remind her brother Alick that it would be so much better
if, instead of wasting his time in playing with silly little tin
soldiers, he would try to learn as much as he could before he was sent
to school; while she was never tired of quoting to her sister Betty the
line, 'Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever!' which Betty,
quite unjustly, interpreted to mean that Priscilla thought but poorly of
her sister's intellectual capacity. Once when, as a great treat, the
children were allowed to read 'Ivanhoe' aloud, Priscilla declined to
participate until she had conscientiously read up the whole Norman
period in her English history; and on another occasion she cried
bitterly on hearing that her mother had arranged for them to learn
dancing, and even endured bread and water for an entire day rather than
consent to acquire an accomplishment which she feared, from what she had
read, would prove a snare. On the second day--well, there was roast beef
and Yorkshire pudding for dinner, and Priscilla yielded; but she made
the resolution--and kept it too--that, if she went to the dancing class,
she would firmly refuse to take the slightest pains to learn a single
step.

I only mention all these traits to show that Priscilla really was an
unusually good child, which makes it the more sad and strange that her
family should have profited so little by her example. She was neither
loved nor respected as she ought to have been, I am grieved to say. Her
papa, when he was not angry, made the cruellest fun of her mild
reproofs; her mother continued to spend money on dresses and bonnets,
and even allowed the maid to say that her mistress was 'not at home,'
when she was merely unwilling to receive visitors. Alick and Betty, too,
only grew more exasperated when Priscilla urged them to keep their
tempers, and altogether she could not help feeling how wasted and thrown
away she was in such a circle.

But she never quite lost heart; her papa was a literary man and wrote
tales, some of which she feared were not as true as they affected to be,
while he invariably neglected to insert a moral in any of them;
frequently she dropped little remarks before him with apparent
carelessness, in the hope that he might put them in print--but he never
did; she neve