e she was a veritable good fairy; her knowledge seemed
unerring and intuitive; and whether she washed or ironed, or moulded
biscuit or conserved plums, her gentle beauty seemed to turn to poetry
all the prose of life.

There was something in Mary, however, which divided her as by an
appreciable line from ordinary girls of her age. From her father she had
inherited a deep and thoughtful nature, predisposed to moral and
religious exaltation. Had she been born in Italy, under the dissolving
influences of that sunny, dreamy clime, beneath the shadow of
cathedrals, and where pictured saints and angels smiled in clouds of
painting from every arch and altar, she might, like fair St. Catherine
of Siena, have seen beatific visions in the sunset skies, and a silver
dove descending upon her as she prayed; but, unfolding in the clear,
keen, cold New England clime, and nurtured in its abstract and positive
theologies, her religious faculties took other forms. Instead of lying
entranced in mysterious raptures at the foot of altars, she read and
ponder treatises on the Will, and listened in rapt attention while her
spiritual guide, the venerated Dr. H., unfolded to her the theories of
the great Edwards on the nature of true virtue. Womanlike, she felt the
subtile poetry of these sublime abstractions which dealt with such
infinite and unknown quantities,--which spoke of the universe, of its
great Architect, of man, of angels, as matters of intimate and daily
contemplation; and her teacher, a grand-minded and simple-hearted man as
ever lived, was often amazed at the tread with which this fair young
child walked through these high regions of abstract thought,--often
comprehending through an ethereal clearness of nature what he had
laboriously and heavily reasoned out; and sometimes, when she turned her
grave, childlike face upon him with some question or reply, the good man
started as if an angel had looked suddenly out upon him from a cloud.
Unconsciously to himself, he often seemed to follow her, as Dante
followed the flight of Beatrice, through the ascending circles of the
celestial spheres.

When her mother questioned him, anxiously, of her daughter's spiritual
estate, he answered, that she was a child of a strange graciousness of
nature, and of a singular genius; to which Katy responded, with a
woman's pride, that she was all her father over again. It is only now
and then that a matter-of-fact woman is sublimated by a real love; bu