. The letter was
never sent, and the packing never finished. Uncle Jethro wished her to
stay and to learn to be a lady, and stay she would, in spite of Miss
Broke and the rest of them. She went to school the next day, and for
many days and weeks thereafter, and held communion with the few alone
who chose to treat her pleasantly. Unquestionably this is making a
heroine of Cynthia.

If young men are cruel in their schools, what shall be written of young
women? It would be better to say that both are thoughtless. Miss Sally
Broke, strange as it may seem, had a heart, and many of the other young
ladies whose fathers sailed for Europe and owned picture galleries; but
these young ladies were absorbed, especially after vacation, in affairs
of which a girl from Coniston had no part. Their friends were not her
friends, their amusements not her amusements, and their talk not her
talk. But Cynthia watched them, as was her duty, and gradually absorbed
many things which are useful if not essential--outward observances of
which the world takes cognizance, and which she had been sent there by
Uncle Jethro to learn. Young people of Cynthia's type and nationality
are the most adaptable in the world.

Before the December snows set in Cynthia had made one firm friend, at
least, in Boston; outside of the Merrill family. That friend was Miss
Lucretia Penniman, editress of the Woman's Hour. Miss Lucretia lived in
the queerest and quaintest of the little houses tucked away under the
hill, with the back door a story higher than the fronts an arrangement
which in summer enabled the mistress to walk out of her sitting-room
windows into a little walled garden. In winter that sitting room was the
sunniest, cosiest room in the city, and Cynthia spent many hours there,
reading or listening to the wisdom that fell from the lips of Miss
Lucretia or her guests. The sitting room had uneven, yellow-white
panelling that fairly shone with enamel, mahogany bookcases filled with
authors who had chosen to comply with Miss Lucretia's somewhat rigorous
censorship; there was a table laden with such magazines as had to do
with the uplifting of a sex, a delightful wavy floor covered with a rose
carpet; and, needless to add, not a pin or a pair of scissors out of
place in the whole apartment.

There is no intention of enriching these pages with Miss Lucretia's
homilies. Their subject-matter may be found in the files of the Woman's
Hour. She did not always preach