and which, he knew, referred all its
strength and all its stableness to the keeping of another
hand. Most feminine, most humble, and most sure.

"Mr. Winthrop, your mother puzzles me," said Elizabeth. "I
wish I knew some of her secrets."

"I wish I did," he answered with half a sigh.

"Why, don't you!"

"No."

"I thought you did."

"No; for she says they can only be arrived at through a
certain initiation which I have not had -- after certain
preliminary steps, which I have not yet taken."

Elizabeth looked at him, both surprised and curious.

"What are they?"

Winthrop's face was graver than usual, as he said,

"I wish my mother were here to answer you."

"Why, cannot you?"

"No."

"Don't you know the preliminary steps, Mr. Landholm?"

He looked very grave again.

"Not clearly enough to tell you. In general, I know she would
say there is a narrow way to be passed through before the
treasures of truth, or its fair prospects, can be arrived at;
but I have never gone that way myself and I cannot point out
the way-marks."

"Are you referring to the narrow gate spoken of in the Bible?"

"To the same."

"Then you are getting upon what _I_ do not understand," said
Elizabeth.

They had mounted the steps of No. 11, and were waiting for the
door to be opened. They waited silently till it was done, and
then parted with only a 'good night.' Elizabeth did not ask
him in, and it hardly occurred to Winthrop to wonder that she
did not.

Mr. Landholm read no classics that night. Neither law.
Neither, which may seem more strange, did he consult his Book
of books at all. He busied himself, not exactly with the study
of the human mind, but of two human minds, -- which, though at
first sight it may seem an enlargement of the subject, is in
fact rather a contracted view of the same.

CHAPTER XXII.

_Sir Toby_. Do not our lives consist of the four elements?
_Sir And._ 'Faith, so they say, but, I think, it rather consists
of eating and drinking.
TWELFTH NIGHT.

"Dear, Mr. Winthrop, -- what makes all this smoke here?"
exclaimed Mrs. Nettley one morning, as she opened the door of
his attic.

"I suppose, the wind, Mrs. Nettley," said Winthrop looking up
from the book he was studying.

"O dear! -- how do you manage?"

"I can't manage the smoke, Mrs. Nettley -- Its resources exceed
mine."

"It's that chimney!" exclaimed the good lady, standing and
eyeing it in a sort of desperate concern, as if she