them pass
away in earlier years, and leave behind in many hearts the anxious
wonder, why they came so fair only to mock the love they kindled. They
who live to maturity are the priests and priestesses of the spiritual
life, ordained of God to keep the balance between the rude but absolute
necessities of physical life and the higher sphere to which that must at
length give place.

CHAPTER XVII

LESSONS

Moses felt elevated some inches in the world by the gift of a new Latin
grammar, which had been bought for him in Brunswick. It was a step
upward in life; no graduate from a college ever felt more ennobled.

"Wal', now, I tell ye, Moses Pennel," said Miss Roxy, who, with her
press-board and big flat-iron, was making her autumn sojourn in the
brown house, "I tell ye Latin ain't just what you think 'tis, steppin'
round so crank; you must remember what the king of Israel said to
Benhadad, king of Syria."

"I don't remember; what did he say?"

"I remember," said the soft voice of Mara; "he said, 'Let not him that
putteth on the harness boast as him that putteth it off.'"

"Good for you, Mara," said Miss Roxy; "if some other folks read their
Bibles as much as you do, they'd know more."

Between Moses and Miss Roxy there had always been a state of sub-acute
warfare since the days of his first arrival, she regarding him as an
unhopeful interloper, and he regarding her as a grim-visaged,
interfering gnome, whom he disliked with all the intense, unreasoning
antipathy of childhood.

"I hate that old woman," he said to Mara, as he flung out of the door.

"Why, Moses, what for?" said Mara, who never could comprehend hating
anybody.

"I do hate her, and Aunt Ruey, too. They are two old scratching cats;
they hate me, and I hate them; they're always trying to bring me down,
and I won't be brought down."

Mara had sufficient instinctive insight into the feminine role in the
domestic concert not to adventure a direct argument just now in favor of
her friends, and therefore she proposed that they should sit down
together under a cedar hard by, and look over the first lesson.

"Miss Emily invited me to go over with you," she said, "and I should
like so much to hear you recite."

Moses thought this very proper, as would any other male person, young or
old, who has been habitually admired by any other female one. He did not
doubt that, as in fishing and rowing, and all other things he had
undertaken as yet, he shou