d rather you should go. You ought to be there --
and I may as well learn at once to get used to it."

"But it will be very bad for you, Miss Elizabeth."

"I think it is right, Mrs. Nettley."

So Mrs. Nettley went; and how their young lady passed her days
and bore the quietude and the sorrow of them, the rest of the
household marvelled together.

"She'd die, if there was dyin' stuff in her," said Clam; "but
there ain't."

"What for should she die?" said Karen.

"I'm as near dead as I can be, myself," was Clam's conclusive
reply.

"What ails you, girl?"

"I can't catch my breath good among all these mountains," said
Clam. "I guess the hills spiles the air hereabouts."

"Your young lady don't think so."

"No," said Clam, -- "she looks at the mountains as if she'd
swaller them whole -- them and her Bible; -- only she looks into
that as if it would swaller her."

"Poor bird! she's beat down; -- its too lonesome up here for
her!" said Karen more tenderly than her wont was.

"That ain't no sign she'll go," said Clam. "She's as notional
as the Governor himself, when she takes a notion; only there's
some sense in his, and you never know where the sense of hers
is till it comes out."

"The house is so still, it's pitiful to hear it," said Karen.
"I never minded it when there wa'n't nobody in it -- I knowed
the old family was all gone -- but now I hear it, seems to me,
the whole day long. You can't hear a foot, when you ain't in
there."

"That'll last awhile, maybe," said Clam; "and then you'll have
a row. 'Tain't in her to keep still more'n a certain length o'
time; and when she comes out, there'll be a firing up, I tell
ye."

"The Lord 'll keep his own," said Karen rising from the table.
Which sentence Clam made nothing of.

Spite of her anticipations, the days, and the weeks, sped on
smoothly and noiselessly. Indeed _more_ quietness, and not less,
seemed to be the order of them. Probably too much for
Elizabeth's good, if such a state of mere mind-life had been
of long lasting. It would not long have been healthy. The stir
of passion, at first, was fresh enough to keep her thoughts
fresh; but as time went on there were fewer tears and a more
settled borne-down look of sorrow. Even her Bible, constantly
studied, -- even prayer, constantly made over it, did not
hinder this. Her active nature was in an unnatural state; it
could not be well so. And it sometimes burst the bounds she
had set to it, and indulg