led me. My
surprises, though inclined to take something of the nature of an
accumulation of calamities, had never lacked the great element of
awe-producing wonder.

For the rest, I had known that I should be forgiven and received with the
usual _eclat_ of the returned prodigal into the family bosom--but to be
held up on successive days as an object of ever-increasing marvel and
interest, as one whose words and acts were endowed with a peculiar
significance, as the light of the social fireside, the enchanter of small
spell-bound audiences! Well, I had been spoiled so early in life that
little was needed to complete the wreck. I felt a deeper satisfaction
when, as I was meekly beseeching our Bridget's instruction in some
particular branch of the culinary art, that majestic female observed, as
she folded her arms and looked down on me complacently:--

"There's one thing I like better about you than I used to, miss--you do
have to wade through a great deal o' flour to larn a little plain cooking
but Job himself couldn't a' be'n no patienter." And it was indeed true
that my "Graham gems" never quite reached perfection, though they bore
with them marks of earnest and faithful endeavor.

I found new sources of interest everywhere, and in ways which I had
formerly regarded with aversion and disdain.

At the "Newtown Ladies' Charitable Sewing Society," I was elevated from
among the common stitchers and sewers, for faithfulness in service,--I
believe, though malicious fingers would point to the distortion of the
legs of little heathens' trousers--to a place on the "cutting circle."
From the cutting circle, it is needless to say, I was speedily exalted to
a presidential chair of easeful observation and general vague
superintendency.

Later, there was a revival of the "Literary Club." There John Cable and I
shone once more amid a group of familiar and undimmed luminaries. John
Cable never took up the exact thread of the discourse broken off so
abruptly on the day of my return, in the cars, but it was when coming
home from the club one evening that he expressed himself to the effect
that I had always been a great burden on his mind, ever since the first
day he led me to school, and, to be sure, I had shown signs of
improvement lately, but there was always a pardonable doubt as to what I
might do next, and it was wearing on him, and would I set his mind at
rest by allowing him, in some sense, to take the direction of my life
in