beginning," she says very low and solemn, "and I
feel that everything will be different. I wish I could be _sure_,
though, that it would be!"

"Why don't you try the larkspurs, miss," says I. "They'll tell you."

My mother, you must know, was a great believer in signs. Not being
much educated, she went by them, I suppose, the way plain people will,
be it ever so. There's no use saying it's against religion--mother was
as religious as any one, take who you will--they will do it. If a bird
flew into the house, there was death for sure, and she never would let
three candles be lighted, no matter whose the house. And so my sister
and I had many of these ways and signs, and always told how things
would be by larkspurs. So I told Miss Lisbet how to strip them off for
"yes, no, yes, no," and she asked her question very solemn:

"_Larkspur, larkspur, tell me true,_
_Or never again I'll trust to you!_

Is there to be a great change in my life?" And she stripped them off,
mumbling-like to herself, "Yes, no, yes, no"--and the last off was "no."

And then she cried, poor thing, and I with her, for we both believed in
'em, but Dick only laughed and said it was all foolishness.

"If you want to do different from what you have been, Lisbet, of course
you can," says he, and then the old doctor came and fetched us both
home.

"I'm going to begin my studying, just the same!" she calls after us,
and I watched the sun on her hair till the coachman's cottage cut us
off.

Well, the governess came and they'd lessons all morning long and music
practising afternoons, but there was no missionary study, because she
took it into her head that I must be educated and know all she knew--as
if that was likely! Still, I picked up a good bit, here and there, and
the gardener's little boy, that was backward and dumb-like, isn't
forgetting to-day what he owes to Miss Lisbet, I'll warrant. Three
days a week she'd read to him and spell the letters and sums plain--and
him that was the mock of the scholars, so that he'd never go near the
school, what is he now, I ask you? Professor in Yale College, and
helped Dr. Stanchon in the planning of a big school for those children
that are backward-like, as he was, and many of them as bright as
bright, really. They manage such as them better than they did in those
days, doctor says, and most of it owed to Henry Wilson's boy.

Often and often we'd walk up to her tea from the lodge, her setting