r, stammeringly.

"Your hour is ten, Miss Kellett."

"I think so."

"How is your father, Miss Kellett?" asked the alderman, abruptly, and
not sorry to interpose at the juncture.

"He is well, sir, and seems very happy," said she, gratefully, while her
eyes lighted up with pleasure.

"Give him my regards," said Hawkshaw, good-naturedly, and passed down
the stairs; while his wife coldly added,--

"The children are waiting for you," and disappeared.

With what determined energy did she address herself now to her
task,--how resolutely devote her whole mind to her duty. She read and
heard and corrected and amended with all the intense anxiety of one
eager to discharge her trust honestly and well. She did her very utmost
to bring her faculties to bear upon every detail of her task; and it
was only when one of the girls asked who was he whose name she had
been writing over and over again in her copy-book, that she forgot her
self-imposed restraint, and in a fervor of delight at the question,
replied, "I 'll tell you, Mary, who Savonarola was."

In all the vigor of true narrative power, the especial gift of those
minds where the play of fancy is only the adornment of the reasoning
faculty, she gave a rapid sketch of the prophet priest, his zeal, his
courage, and his martyrdom; with that captivating fascination which is
the firstborn of true enthusiasm, she awakened their interest so deeply
that they listened to all she said as to a romance whose hero had won
their sympathies, and even dimly followed her as she told them that
such men as this stood out from time to time in the world's history
like great beacons blazing on a rocky eminence, to guide and warn their
fellow-men. That in their own age characters of this stamp were either
undervalued or actually depreciated and condemned, was but the common
lot of humanity; their own great destinies raised them very often above
the sympathies of ordinary life, and men caught eagerly at the blemishes
of those so vastly greater than themselves,--hence all the disesteem
they met with from contemporaries.

"And are there none like this now, Miss Bella?" asked one of the girls;
"or is it that in our country such are not to be met with?"

"They are of every land and of every age; ay, and of every station!
Country, time, birth have no prerogative. At one moment the great light
of the earth has been the noblest born in his nation, at another a
peasant,--miles apart in all the acci