ith slow steps climbed up to her little attic room. It was cold
and comfortless enough, bare of all luxuries, but even here the walls
were lined with books, and Erica's little iron bedstead looked somewhat
incongruous surrounded as it was with dingy-looking volumes, dusky
old legal books, works of reference, books atheistical, theological,
metaphysical, or scientific. On one shelf, amid this strangely
heterogeneous collection, she kept her own particular treasures--Brian's
Longfellow, one or two of Dickens's books which Tom had given her, and
the beloved old Grimm and Hans Andersen, which had been the friends
of her childhood and which for "old sakes' sake" she had never had the
heart to sell. The only other trace of her in the strange little bedroom
was in a wonderful array of china animals on the mantlepiece. She was a
great animal lover, and, being a favorite with every one, she received
many votive offerings. Her shrine was an amusing one to look at. A green
china frog played a tuneless guitar; a pensive monkey gazed with clasped
hands and dreadfully human eyes into futurity; there were sagacious
looking elephants, placid rhinoceroses, rampant hares, two pug dogs
clasped in an irrevocable embrace, an enormous lobster, a diminutive
polar bear, and in the center of all a most evil-looking jackdaw about
half an inch high.

But tonight the childish side of Erica was in abeyance; the cares of
womanhood seemed gathering upon her. She put out her candle and sat down
in the dark, racking her brain for some plan by which to relieve her
father and mother. Their life was growing harder and harder. It
seemed to her that poverty in itself was bearable enough, but that the
ever-increasing load of debt was not bearable. As long as she could
remember, it had always been like a mill-stone tied about their necks,
and the ceaseless petty economies and privations seemed of little avail;
she felt very much as if she were one of the Danaids, doomed forever to
pour water into a vessel with a hole in it.

Yet in one sense she was better off than many, for these debts were not
selfish debts--no one had ever known Raeburn to spend an unnecessary
sixpence on himself; all this load had been incurred in the defense of
what he considered the truth--by his unceasing struggles for liberty.
She was proud of the debts, proud to suffer in what she regarded as
the sacred cause; but in spite of that she was almost in despair this
evening, the future l