group
within--Lucy and her cousin sitting under the trees on the green turf,
with Harry and the rabbit close beside them. Nelly thought she had
never seen anything so pretty as Stella, with her rose-leaf complexion
and sunny golden hair. The two might have served a painter for a
contrast, both as to externals and as to the effect of the surrounding
influences which mould human life: the one, from her cradle so
tenderly and luxuriously nurtured, petted, and caressed; the other,
accustomed from her earliest years to privation and hardship, to harsh
tones and wicked words, to all the evil influences which surround a
child left to pick up its education on the city streets. Strange
mystery of the "election of circumstances!"--one of the strangest in
our mystery-surrounded life, never to be cleared up till all crooked
things shall be made straight. Only let the privileged ones, whose
lines have fallen in pleasant places, remember that "to whom much is
given, of them much shall be required."

A forlorn little figure Nelly looked as she strolled along the
field-paths which Bessie had taken an hour before. But she did not
trouble herself much about externals, except when in company with
others whose better attire made her painfully conscious of the defects
in her own; and being of a nature open to every impression from
surrounding objects, she was at that moment far from being an unhappy
child. It was not often that she was completely free to wander at
will; and the fresh breezy fields, the sweet scents of the clover and
the pines, the blue rippling river, and the cows that looked calmly at
her with their patient, wistful eyes, were all novelties to the town
child, whose first summer it was in the country. Some faint
recollections she still had of the grassy slopes of her native hills,
in the days of her early childhood; but since then all her experiences
of summer had been the hot, hard pavements and stifling dust of a
large city.

She had never before extended her wanderings in the direction of Mill
Bank Farm so far as to reach the ravine through which the little
stream flowed into the river; and now, when she came to the edge of
the steep slope and looked down into the luxuriant depth of foliage
and fern and ragged moss-clad rock, she felt a sense of delight more
intense than Bessie Ford or Lucy Raymond, familiar all their lives
with such scenes, had ever experienced. She stood spell-bound at
first, and then, scrambling do