ffering much in appearance, and still more
widely in character and in the circumstances of their lives.

Close to Miss Preston, and watching every look of the teacher she
loved and grieved at losing, sat Lucy Raymond, the minister's
motherless daughter, a slight, delicate-looking girl, with dark hair
and bright grey eyes, full of energy and thought, but possessing a
good deal of self-will and love of approbation,--dangerous elements of
character unless modified and restrained by divine grace.

Next to her sat fair, plump, rosy-cheeked, curly-haired Bessie Ford,
from the Mill Bank Farm--an amiable, kind-hearted little damsel, and a
favourite with all her companions, but careless and thoughtless, with
a want of steadiness and moral principle which made her teacher long
to see the taking root of the good seed, whose development might
supply what was lacking.

Very different from both seemed the third member of the class--a
forlorn-looking child, who sat shyly apart from the others, shrinking
from proximity with their neat, tasteful summer attire, as if she felt
the contrast between her own dress and appearance and that of her
school-fellows. Poor Nelly Connor's dingy straw hat and tattered
cotton dress, as well as her pale, meagre face, with its bright hazel
eyes gleaming from under the tangled brown hair, showed evident signs
of poverty and neglect. She was a stranger there, having only recently
come to Ashleigh, and had been found wandering about, a Sunday or two
before, by Miss Preston, who had coaxed her into the Sunday school,
and had kept her in her own class until she should become a little
more familiar with scenes so strange and new. Curiosity and wonder
seemed at first to absorb all her faculties, and her senses seemed so
evidently engrossed with the novelty of what she saw around her, that
her teacher could scarcely hope she took in any of the instruction
which in the most simple words she tried to impress on her wandering
mind. And so very ignorant was she of the most elementary truths of
Christianity, that Miss Preston scarcely dared to ask her the simplest
question, for fear of drawing towards her the wondering gaze of her
more favoured classmates, who, accustomed from infancy to hear of a
Saviour's love and sacrifice for sin, could scarcely comprehend how
any child,

"Born in Christian lands,
And not a heathen or a Jew,"

could have grown up to nearly their own age, ignorant of things which
we