with nothing to do.

THE INQUISITIVE GIRL

Dr. Hammond was a physician in great practice in the West of England.
He resided in a small market-town and his family consisted of one son,
named Charles, and two daughters, Louisa and Sophy.

Sophy possessed many amiable qualities, and did not want for sense,
but every better feeling was lost in her extreme inquisitiveness. Her
faculties were all occupied in peeping and prying about, and, provided
she could gratify her own curiosity, she never cared how much vexation
she caused to others.

This propensity began when she was so very young that it had become a
habit before her parents perceived it. She was a very little creature
when she was once nearly squeezed to death between two double doors as
she was peeping through the keyhole of one of them to see who was in
the drawing-room; and another time she was locked up for several hours
in a closet in which she had hid herself for the purpose of
overhearing what her mother was saying to one of the servants.

When Sophy was eleven and her sister about sixteen years old their
mother died. Louisa was placed at the head of her father's house, and
the superintendence of Sophy's education necessarily devolved on her.
The care of such a family was a great charge for a young person of
Miss Hammond's age, and more especially as her father was obliged to
be so much from home that she could not always have his counsel and
advice even when she most needed it. By this means she fell into an
injudicious mode of treating her sister.

If Louisa received a note she carefully locked it up, and never spoke
of its contents before Sophy. If a message was brought to her she
always went out of the room to receive it, and never suffered the
servant to speak in her sister's hearing. When any visitors came
Louisa commonly sent Sophy out of the room, or if they were intimate
friends she would converse with them in whispers; in short, it was her
chief study that everything which passed in the family should be a
secret from Sophy. Alas! this procedure, instead of repressing Sophy's
curiosity, only made it the more keen; her eyes and ears were always
on the alert, and what she could not see, hear, or thoroughly
comprehend she made out by guesses.

The worst consequence of Louisa's conduct was that as Sophy had no
friend and companion in her sister, who treated her with such constant
suspicion and reserve, she necessarily was induced to find a