m of keys and excellent locks prevailing in the
well-watched household. Miss Lois's conscience would not allow her to
employ half-breeds, who were sometimes endurable servants; duty
required, she said, that she should have full-blooded natives. And she
had them. She always began to teach them the alphabet within three days
after their arrival, and the spectacle of a tearful, freshly caught
Indian girl, very wretched in her calico dress and white apron, worn out
with the ways of the kettles and brasses, dejected over the fish-balls,
and appalled by the pudding, standing confronted by a large alphabet on
the well-scoured table, and Miss Lois by her side with a pointer, was
frequent and even regular in its occurrence, the only change being in
the personality of the learners. No one of them had ever gone through
the letters; but Miss Lois was not discouraged. Patiently she began over
again--she was always beginning over again. And in the mean time she was
often obliged not only to do almost all the household work with her own
hands, but to do it twice over in order to instruct the new-comer. By
the unwritten law of public opinion, Dr. Gaston was obliged to employ
only Protestant servants; by the unwritten law of her own conscience,
Miss Lois was obliged to employ only Indians. But in truth she did not
employ them so much as they employed her.

Miss Lois received her young friends in the sitting-room. There was a
parlor with Brussels carpet and hair-cloth sofa across the hall, but its
blinds were closed, and its shades drawn down. The parlor of
middle-class households in the cold climate of the Northern States
generally is a consecrated apartment, with the chill atmosphere and much
of the solemnity of a tomb. It may be called the high altar of the
careful housewife; but even here her sense of cleanliness and dustless
perfection is such that she keeps it cold. No sacred fire burns, no
cheerful ministry is allowed; everything is silent and veiled. The
apartment is of no earthly use--nor heavenly, save perhaps for ghosts.
But take it away, and the housewife is miserable; leave it, and she
lives on contentedly in her sitting-room all the year round, knowing it
is _there_.

Miss Lois's sitting-room was cheery; it had a rag-carpet, a bright fire,
and double-glass panes instead of the heavy woollen curtains which the
villagers hung over their windows in the winter--curtains that kept out
the cold, but also the light. Miss Lois's c