g through.

"But she did not always weep. She taught me to read, while she toiled
with her needle, and she told me tales of the genii and of fairy-land,
at twilight hour, or as she used to say, '_entre le loup et le chien_,'
in her own expressive, idiomatic language. She told me, too, stories
from the Bible, before I was able to read them, of Isaac bound on the
sacrificial pyre, with his father kneeling by him, ready to plunge the
knife in his young heart, when the angels called to him out of heaven to
stay his uplifted hand; of Joseph's wondrous history, from his coat of
many colors, fatal cause of fraternal jealousy, to the royal robes and
golden chain with which Pharaoh invested him; of David, the
shepherd-boy, the minstrel monarch, the conqueror of Philistia's giant
chief. It was thus she employed the dim hours between the setting sun
and the rising stars; but the moment she lighted her lonely lamp she
again plied her busy needle, though alas! too often rusted with her
tears.

"Thus my early childhood passed,--and every day my heart twined more
closely round my mother's heart, and I began to form great plans of
future achievements to be wrought for her. I would be a second Joseph
and go to some distant land and win fame, and honors, and wealth, and
send for her that I might lay them all at her feet. She would not, at
first, recognize her boy in the purple and fine linen of his sumptuous
attire; but I would fall on her neck, and lift up my voice and weep
aloud, and then she would know her child. A mother's tears, Gabriella,
nurture great aspirations in a child.

"I used to accompany her to the shop when she carried home her work. It
was there she first met the gentleman whose name I bear. Their
acquaintance commenced through me, to whom he seemed peculiarly
attracted, and he won my admiring gratitude by the gifts he lavished
upon me. He came often to see my mother, and though at first she shrunk
from his visits, she gradually came to welcome him as a friend and a
benefactor.

"One evening, I think I was about eight or nine years old, she took me
in her arms, and told me, with many tears, that Mr. Clyde, the good and
kind gentleman whom I loved so much, had offered to be a father to me,
and was going to take us both to a pleasant home in the country, where I
could run about in the green fields, and be free as the birds of the
air. She told me that perhaps my own father was living, but that he had
left her so long