ng to toddle and to
engage in conscious mischief--a beauty with which you can never be
angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the
state of mind into which it throws you....It is of little use for me to
tell you that Hetty's cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played
about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness
under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back
under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate
rings on her forehead, and about her white shell-like ears; it is of
little use for me to say how lovely was the contour of her
pink-and-white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-colored stuff
bodice, or how the linen butter-making apron, with its bib, seemed a
thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such
charming lines, or how her brown stockings and thick-soled buckled shoes
lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when empty
of her foot and ankle--of little use unless you have seen a woman who
affected you as Hetty affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you
might conjure up the image of a lovely woman, she would not in the least
resemble that distracting kitten-like maiden. I might mention all the
divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in your life
utterly forgotten yourself in straining your eyes after the mounting
lark, or in wandering through the still lanes when the fresh-opened
blossoms fill them with a sacred, silent beauty like that of fretted
aisles, where would be the use of my descriptive catalogue? I could
never make you know what I meant by a bright spring day. Hetty's was a
spring-tide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things,
round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of
innocence--the innocence of a young star-browed calf, for example, that,
being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe
steeple-chase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the
middle of a bog.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great
tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us
by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and
ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every
movement. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the
thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's--averted from