and despised.

Charlotte, the sick girl, was two years younger than Sophy, and very
different in person, mind, and character. A fair, soft, delicate face,
more winning than handsome, but full of gentleness and sweetness, was a
perfect transcript of the pure spirit that animated the faithful heart
in which it was enshrined. She might have been described in those
charming lines of Wordsworth, as--

"The sweetest flower that ever grew
Beside a cottage door."

Contented in the midst of poverty, happy in the consciousness of moral
improvement, patient under suffering, and pious without cant, or
affectation of superior godliness, she offered, under the most painful
circumstances, a rare example of Christian resignation to the will of
God.

While reading the Gospel at school, as a portion of her daily task, it
had pleased the All-Wise Dispenser of that blessed revelation to man, to
open her eyes to the importance of those noble truths that were destined
to set her free from the bondage of sin and death. She read, and
believing that she had received a message from the skies, like the man
who found the pearl of great price, she gave her whole heart and soul to
God, in order to secure such an inestimable treasure. The sorrows and
trials of her lowly lot were to her as stepping-stones to the heavenly
land, on which all her hopes were placed, and she regarded the fatal
disease which wasted her feeble frame, and which had now confined her to
the same bed with her mother, as the means employed by God to release
her from the sufferings of earth, and open for her the gates of heaven.
How earnestly, yet how tenderly, she tried to inspire her afflicted
mother with the same hopes that animated her breast! She read to her,
she prayed with her, and endeavoured to explain in the best way she
could that mysterious change which had been wrought in her own soul, and
which now, on the near approach of death, filled her mind with
inexpressible joy.

This reading of the Scriptures was a great consolation to the poor
widow, and one day she remarked in a tone of deep regret and with many
tears--

"Who will read the Bible to me, Charlotte, when you are gone? Mary
cannot read, and if she could, who could understand what she read, and
Sophy hates everything that is serious, and is too selfish to trouble
herself to read aloud to me."

"Mother, I have thought much about that of late," said the sick girl,
raising herself on the pillo