ught to shake
hands or not. Then Fanny went away to take her things off, but Amelia
sat down, and pulled off her scarf, and laid it beside her on the sofa,
not neatly folded, but all huddled up in a heap, and there it might have
stayed till next week if my Aunt Kezia (who hates Amelia's untidy ways)
had not said to her,--

"My dear, had you not better take your things up-stairs?"

Amelia rose with the air of a martyr, threw the scarf on her arm, and
carrying her bonnet by one string, went slowly up-stairs. When they
came down together, my Aunt Kezia said to Fanny,--

"My dear, you had better take a shorter walk another time."

"We have not had a long one, Aunt," said Fanny, looking surprised. "We
only went up by the Scar, and back by Ellen Water."

"I thought you had been much farther than that," says my Aunt Kezia, in
her dry way. "Poor Emily [Note 1.] seemed so tired she could not get
up-stairs."

Fanny stared, and Amelia gave a faint laugh. My Aunt Kezia said no
more, but went on running tucks: and Amelia joined in the conversation
between Cecilia and Mr Parmenter. I hardly listened, for I was trying
the new knitting stitch which Flora taught me, and it is rather a
difficult one, so that it took all my mind: but all at once I heard
Amelia say,--

"The beauty of self-sacrifice!"

My Aunt Kezia lapped up the petticoat in which she was running the
tucks, laid it on her knee, folded her hands on it, and looked full at
Amelia.

"Will you please, Miss Emily Bracewell, to tell me what you mean?"

"Mean, Aunt?"

"Yes, my dear, mean."

"How can the spirit of that sweet poetical creature," murmured Fanny,
behind me, "be made plain to such a mere thing of fact as my Aunt
Kezia?"

"Well," said Amelia, in a rather puzzled tone, "I mean--I mean--the
beauty of self-sacrifice. I do not see how else to put it."

"And what makes it beautiful, think you?" said my Aunt Kezia.

"It is beautiful in itself," said Amelia. "It is the fairest thing in
the moral world. We see it in all the analogies of creation."

"My dear Emily," said my Aunt Kezia, "you may have learned Latin and
Greek, but I have not. I will trouble you to speak plain, if you
please. I am a plain English woman, who knows more about making shirts
and salting butter than about moral worlds and the analogies of
creation. Please to explain yourself--if you understand what you are
talking about. If you don't, of course I wouldn't wish it."

"W