dies, measles, chicken-pox,
whooping-cough for certainty, and scarlet fever and smallpox as
possibilities, for none of them cut short the thread of her life,
nor spoiled her good looks; either of which eventualities would
have prevented this story proceeding beyond the sixth chapter. In
the one case, there would have been no one about whom to write,
in the other, had she been marked by smallpox or deafened by
scarlatina, the interest of the reader could not have been claimed
for her--so exacting is the reader of fiction. A heroine must be
good-looking, or she will not be read about.

Indeed, it is more than probable, that had the author announced his
story to be one of a very plain woman, he might have looked in
vain for a publisher to undertake the issue of the story.

Before proceeding further it will be well to assure the reader
that, from an early age, promise of beauty was given, and not of
beauty only, but of intelligence and robust health.

Mehetabel was sent by Mrs. Verstage not only to a day school, kept
by a widow, in Thursley, but also on the Lord's Day to the Vicar's
Sunday-school at Witley. The Vicar was an excellent man, kindly
disposed, earnest in his desire to do good, so long as the good was
to be done in a novel fashion, absolutely untried. Sunday-schools
were but a recent introduction, and he seized on the expedient with
avidity. Hitherto the children had been catechised in Church after
the second lesson in the afternoon, before their parents and the
entire congregation. But as this was an usage of the past the Vicar
rejected it in favor of the new system. According to the traditional
custom the children had been instructed in the Creed, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. But this did not please the
innovating Vicar, who cast these out of his curriculum to make way
for a knowledge of the geography of Palestine, and an accurate
acquaintance with the genealogies that are to be found scattered
here and there in the pages of Holy Writ, The teaching of doctrine,
according to the Vicar, lay at the bottom of the divisions of
Christendom, but there could be no controversy over the latitude
and longitude of the sites mentioned in Scripture.

The landlord, proprietor of the Ship and of Mrs. Susanna Verstage,
was a dull, obstinate man, slow of thought and of speech, withal
kindly. Like many another dull man, if he did a stupid thing he
stuck to it; and the stupider the thing done, the greater the