Old Testament?"

"Not so much as I should," I answered, realizing with a strange jolt of
mind that it was the Bible she was dragging after her.

"I got it in the attic," she said, as she climbed upon my knee, "and I
thought at first it was a joke-book. And after I thought it was a
fairy-book; but as I go on, _there seems more to it_."

And the second of these episodes was as disconcerting:

The dwarfed boy was Nancy's peculiar care among the Burnside people,
and the question as to why he was made "crookit," as she called it, was
one which I had never been able to answer to her satisfaction.

Coming in one day with a little bunch of violets for me, she stopped
before leaving the room, and said, as though telling me a funny secret:

"Jamie Henderlin took Nancy's money."

"What?" I cried.

"Yes," she said, "took it out of the little bag when he thought I was
not looking."

"What did you do?" I inquired.

"I?" she turned away shyly, "I made out that I didn't see him."

"But, Nancy," I said, "that was not really kind. As he grows older he
will steal."

"Take," she interrupted firmly.

"He will take from other people."

"He is a dwarf, Jock," she said, with a sweet irrelevance, which had
its logic, however, in her kind heart.

"That doesn't make it right."

"He wanted it more than I did," she went on; "I don't need it----"

"That doesn't excuse him, either."

"Perhaps," she said, "if you and I, mine Jock, were made as he is we
might do something worse than he has done. _People laugh at him!_ He
mayn't be right. I'm not saying that he is right; but I _am_ saying
that _I_ am not going to hurt his feelings. The Lord has done that
enough already."

And the third one, never told by Mrs. Opie, and a fortunate thing it
was for us, had to do with her skill in the use of a pen. She was still
a very little child, lying on a rug by the fire, reading out of the
Bible, as I sat at the desk looking over some accounts which would not
come right. There was the matter of a draft for five pounds, with my
own name to it, which I had certainly no remembrance of ever having
signed.

"What's the matter, Jock?" said Nancy, seeing my knit brow.

"They won't come right, Little Flower," I answered.

She came over to me and looked at the accounts.

"Nancy made one just like Jock's," she said.

"What?" I cried, with consternation.

"Nancy--made--one--just--like--Jock's," she repeated. "A poor lady who
was very sick," sh