incing you young people that even death may be a tender
friend, a welcome messenger. But we won't talk in this strain any longer,
I scarce know why we drifted into it. I want your first impressions of
home to be joyous, for they are apt to haunt us long after we make the
discovery that they were not correct."

"I wonder if you are not something of a philosopher? I never heard any
one talk just like you."

"Certainly not anything so formidable, and learned as that. I am only a
plain little woman, with no special mission except to make those around
me happy."

"That is a very beautiful mission, and I am sure you meet with success,
which is not the fate of every one with a career."

"Ah, if you begin praising me I must leave; but first let me tell you
dinner will be served at six. Mr. Winthrop is a great student, and is
already, for so young a man, a very successful author; and he likes
dinner late so as to have all the longer time for hard work. The evenings
he takes for light reading and rest."

I must confess I was beginning to get afraid of my guardian. I expected
to find him in manners and appearance something like our school
professors, with a tendency to criticise my slender literary
acquirements.

However I proceeded with my toilet quite cheerfully, and was rather glad
than sorry that I had found him absent from Oaklands; but after I left my
room and wandered out into the dim, spacious hall and down the long
stairway, the heavy, old-fashioned splendors of the house chilled me. How
could I occupy myself happily through the coming years in this great,
gloomy house? I vaguely wondered, while life stretched out before my
imagination, in long and tiresome perspective.

With no school duties to occupy my time, my knowledge of amusements,
needlework, or any other of the softer feminine accomplishments,
exceedingly limited, I was suddenly confronted with the problem how I was
to fill up the days and years with any degree of satisfaction. Hitherto
every thought had been strained eagerly towards this home coming. After
that fancy was a blank. Now I had got here, what then? I had been a
fairly industrious pupil and graduated with commendable success; but it
had been a tradition at our school that once away from its confinement,
text-books and the weariness of study were at an end. I went out on the
lawn, and was standing, a trifle homesick for the companionship of the
merry crowd of schoolmates, when a side glance rev