evelop into a female Landseer.

This being Sunday, Hazel Thorne's duties were light, and after Mr
Samuel Chute had rapped upon his desk, and read prayers for the benefit
of both schools, the new mistress had little to do beyond
superintending, and trying to make herself at home.

She found that there were four classes in her side of the Sunday-school,
each with its own teacher, certain ladies coming regularly from the
town, chief of whom were the Misses Lambent--Beatrice and Rebecca, the
former a pale, handsome, but rather sinister lady of seven or
eight-and-twenty, the latter a pale, unhandsome, and very sinister lady
of seven or eight-and-thirty, both elegantly dressed, and ready to
receive the new mistress with a cold and distant bow that spoke volumes,
and was as repellant as hailstones before they have touched the earth.

For the Misses Lambent were the vicar's sisters, and taught in the
Sunday-school from a sense of duty. Hazel Thorne was ready to forget
that she was a lady by birth and education. The Misses Lambent were
not; and besides, it was two minutes past nine when Hazel entered the
room. It was five minutes to nine when they rustled in with their
stiffest mien and downcast eyes.

But they always displayed humility, even when they snubbed the girls of
their classes--a humility which prompted them to give up the first class
to Miss Burge--christened Betsey, a name of which she was not in the
least ashamed, and which, like her brother with his William Forth, she
wrote in full.

The third and fourth class girls had an enmity against those of the
first for no other reason than that they were under Miss Burge, who
heard them say their catechism, and read, and asked questions afterwards
out of a little book which she kept half hidden beneath her silk
_visite_; for pleasant, little, homely, round-faced Miss Burge could
hardly have invented a question of an original character to save her
life. One thing, however, was patent, and that was that the first class
was so far a model of good behaviour that the girls did not titter very
much, nor yet pinch one another, or dig elbows into each other's ribs
more than might be expected from young ladies of their station; while
they never by any chance made faces at "teacher" when her back was
turned, a practice that seemed to afford great pleasure to the young
ladies who were submitted to a sort of cold shower-bath, iced with
awkward texts by the Misses Lambent, in c