earned all the womanly little
accomplishments which Mrs. Kittridge has dragooned into Sally. She knits
his mittens and his stockings, and hems his pocket-handkerchiefs, and
aspires to make his shirts all herself. Whatever book Moses reads,
forthwith she aspires to read too, and though three years younger, reads
with a far more precocious insight.

Her little form is slight and frail, and her cheek has a clear
transparent brilliancy quite different from the rounded one of the boy;
she looks not exactly in ill health, but has that sort of transparent
appearance which one fancies might be an attribute of fairies and
sylphs. All her outward senses are finer and more acute than his, and
finer and more delicate all the attributes of her mind. Those who
contend against giving woman the same education as man do it on the
ground that it would make the woman unfeminine, as if Nature had done
her work so slightly that it could be so easily raveled and knit over.
In fact, there is a masculine and a feminine element in all knowledge,
and a man and a woman put to the same study extract only what their
nature fits them to see, so that knowledge can be fully orbed only when
the two unite in the search and share the spoils.

When Moses was full of Romulus and Numa, Mara pondered the story of the
nymph Egeria--sweet parable, in which lies all we have been saying. Her
trust in him was boundless. He was a constant hero in her eyes, and in
her he found a steadfast believer as to all possible feats and exploits
to which he felt himself competent, for the boy often had privately
assured her that he could command the Brilliant as well as father
himself.

Spring had already come, loosing the chains of ice in all the bays and
coves round Harpswell, Orr's Island, Maquoit, and Middle Bay. The
magnificent spruces stood forth in their gala-dresses, tipped on every
point with vivid emerald; the silver firs exuded from their tender
shoots the fragrance of ripe pineapple; the white pines shot forth long
weird fingers at the end of their fringy boughs; and even every little
mimic evergreen in the shadows at their feet was made beautiful by the
addition of a vivid border of green on the sombre coloring of its last
year's leaves. Arbutus, fragrant with its clean, wholesome odors, gave
forth its thousand dewy pink blossoms, and the trailing Linnea borealis
hung its pendent twin bells round every mossy stump and old rock damp
with green forest mould. The