keep in
their desks, intertwined with the plumes of the buckeye, the syringa,
and the wood anemone, and here and there the master noticed the
dark-blue cowl of the monkshood, or deadly aconite. There was something
in the odd association of this noxious plant with these memorials which
occasioned a painful sensation to the master deeper than his esthetic
sense. One day, during a long walk, in crossing a wooded ridge he came
upon Mliss in the heart of the forest, perched upon a prostrate pine on
a fantastic throne formed by the hanging plumes of lifeless branches,
her lap full of grasses and pine burrs, and crooning to herself one of
the Negro melodies of her younger life. Recognizing him at a distance,
she made room for him on her elevated throne, and with a grave
assumption of hospitality and patronage that would have been ridiculous
had it not been so terribly earnest, she fed him with pine nuts and crab
apples. The master took that opportunity to point out to her the noxious
and deadly qualities of the monkshood, whose dark blossoms he saw in her
lap, and extorted from her a promise not to meddle with it as long
as she remained his pupil. This done--as the master had tested her
integrity before--he rested satisfied, and the strange feeling which had
overcome him on seeing them died away.

Of the homes that were offered Mliss when her conversion became known,
the master preferred that of Mrs. Morpher, a womanly and kindhearted
specimen of Southwestern efflorescence, known in her maidenhood as the
"Per-rairie Rose." Being one of those who contend resolutely against
their own natures, Mrs. Morpher, by a long series of self-sacrifices and
struggles, had at last subjugated her naturally careless disposition to
principles of "order," which she considered, in common with Mr. Pope,
as "Heaven's first law." But she could not entirely govern the orbits
of her satellites, however regular her own movements, and even her own
"Jeemes" sometimes collided with her. Again her old nature asserted
itself in her children. Lycurgus dipped into the cupboard "between
meals," and Aristides came home from school without shoes, leaving those
important articles on the threshold, for the delight of a barefooted
walk down the ditches. Octavia and Cassandra were "keerless" of their
clothes. So with but one exception, however much the "Prairie Rose"
might have trimmed and pruned and trained her own matured luxuriance,
the little shoots came up def