not
only for help, but for the rarer consolations of living sympathy and
counsel. Her shrewd common sense, her practical capacity, her kindly,
cheerful face, her power of appreciating a position of want and perplexity
and seeing the best way out of it, and, above all, her deep and fervent
religious feeling, made her an invaluable friend to just that class who
most needed her.

In the course of this spring we gained an addition to our society, in the
person of Mr. Waring, the son of the gentleman who had bought the mills at
Mrs. Boyle's death, but who had hitherto conducted them by an overseer. He
had recently bought a little island in the middle of the river, just below
the dam, and proposed erecting a new mill upon it; but as the Tunxis (the
Indian name of our river) was liable to rapid and destructive freshets,
the mill required a deep and secure foundation and a lower story of stone.

This implied some skilful engineering, and Mr. Arthur Waring, having
studied this subject fully abroad, came on from Boston, and took up his
abode in Valley Mills village. Of course, we being his only hope of
society in the place, he made our acquaintance early. I rather liked him;
his manner was good, his perceptions acute, his tastes refined, and he had
a certain strength of will that gave force to a character otherwise
common-place. Josephine liked him at once; she laid his shyness and
_brusquerie_, which were only the expression of a dominant self-
consciousness, to genuine modesty. He was depressed and moody, because he
was bored for want of acquaintance, and missed the adulation and caresses
that he received at home as an only child; but Jo's swift imagination
painted this as the trait of a reflective and melancholy nature disgusted
with the world, and pitied him accordingly; a mild way of misanthropic
speech, that is apt to infest young men, added to this delusion; and, with
all the energy of her sweet, earnest disposition, Josephine undertook his
education,--undertook to teach him faith and hope and charity, to set
right his wayward soul, to renovate his bitter opinions, to make him a
better and a happier man.

It is a well-known fact in the philosophy of the human mind, that it is
apt to gain more by imparting than by receiving; and since philosophy,
where it becomes fact, does not mercifully adjust its results to
circumstance, but rushes on in implacable grooves, and clears its own
track of whatever lies thereon by the summa