chine caught her eye. The machine alone was a
wonder and beauty; it seemed to Faith like an elegant little brass gun
mounted on the most complicate and exquisite of gun carriages--with its
multiplication of wheels and screws and pins, by which its adjustment
might be regulated to a hair; with its beautiful workmanship and high
finish, and its most marvellous and admirable purpose and adaptation.
Dr. Harrison had never adjusted his microscope with more satisfaction,
perhaps, than with those childish womanly eyes looking on; and neither
he nor _many_ other people ever performed better the subsequent office
of exhibiting it. He troubled Faith now with nothing; his very manner
was changed; and with kindness and sense most delicate, most
thoughtful, most graceful always, gave her all he could give her.

He was a trifle surprised to find that the amount of that was not more.
There was no lack indeed; he could talk and she could listen
indefinitely--and did;--nevertheless he found some of his channels of
communication stopped off. At the first thing he shewed her, Faith
looked for an instant and then withdrawing her eye from the microscope
and facing him with cheeks absolutely paled with excitement and
feeling, exclaimed rapturously,

"Oh!--are those the chalk shells?"

The doctor hadn't counted upon her knowing anything of chalk shells

"Aunt Ellen--" said he, as he looked to shift or adjust something--"do
you think Miss Derrick has ever lived upon anything worse than roses?"

"Upon something stronger, I fancy," said Mrs. Somers, a little
surprised in her turn, but well pleased too, for Faith had come nearer
her heart that evening than ever before, and the voyage of discovery
was pleasant.

"I should certainly think I was in Persia!" said the doctor,--"only the
bulbul knows nothing of scientific discoveries, I fancy."

But Faith was in no danger of hearing, or caring, if she had
understood; she had gone back to the chalk shells, and back still
further, from them, into the world of those perfections which God had
made _for himself_. A new world, now for the first time actually seen
by her, and for a moment she almost lost her standing in this. Mrs.
Somers watched her, smiling and curious.

She drew back presently with a long breath, to give the other ladies a
chance; but Miss Harrison had looked all she cared to look, and Mrs.
Somers was not new to the thing. They took a view occasionally, one for
form, the other for