h on the embroidered slippers, they would have been as useless as
the artist's developing solution on a plate which had never been exposed
in the camera. But she had been of late in training for her lesson in
ways that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has
shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps
hear this one which follows more cheerfully. The physician in the
Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow
handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was
the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so
much consequence as the fact that he did at any rate get well.

These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had
given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just
now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms. And so it
happened that, while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and
emotional elements of her nature which responded to the keys he loved
to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the
mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky,
had been quietly doing their work. The color was fast returning to
her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually
resolving themselves into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily
and mental health. It needed but the timely word from the fitting lips
to change the whole programme of her daily mode of being. The word
had been spoken. She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away
a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate! How hard for
any!--but for a girl so young, and who had as yet found so little to
love and trust, how cruelly hard!

She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her eyes were fixed
on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting. It was a
very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by
the first emigrant of her race. The legs and arms were curiously
turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half
repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later
date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed
to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of
the ugly creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful
ancestress, her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare,