er part.

"You seem to be very glad to be rid of me," he said to her in a bitter
tone one day, as she was earnestly busy in her preparations.

Now the fact was, that Moses had been assiduously making himself
disagreeable to Mara for the fortnight past, by all sorts of unkind
sayings and doings; and he knew it too; yet he felt a right to feel very
much abused at the thought that she could possibly want him to be going.
If she had been utterly desolate about it, and torn her hair and sobbed
and wailed, he would have asked what she could be crying about, and
begged not to be bored with scenes; but as it was, this cheerful
composure was quite unfeeling.

Now pray don't suppose Moses to be a monster of an uncommon species. We
take him to be an average specimen of a boy of a certain kind of
temperament in the transition period of life. Everything is chaos
within; the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the
flesh, and "light and darkness, and mind and dust, and passion and pure
thoughts, mingle and contend," without end or order. He wondered at
himself sometimes that he could say such cruel things as he did to his
faithful little friend--to one whom, after all, he did love and trust
before all other human beings.

There is no saying why it is that a man or a boy, not radically
destitute of generous comprehensions, will often cruelly torture and
tyrannize over a woman whom he both loves and reveres, who stands in his
soul in his best hours as the very impersonation of all that is good and
beautiful. It is as if some evil spirit at times possessed him, and
compelled him to utter words which were felt at the moment to be mean
and hateful. Moses often wondered at himself, as he lay awake nights,
how he could have said and done the things he had, and felt miserably
resolved to make it up somehow before he went away; but he did not.

He could not say, "Mara, I have done wrong," though he every day meant
to do it, and sometimes sat an hour in her presence, feeling murky and
stony, as if possessed by a dumb spirit; then he would get up and fling
stormily out of the house.

Poor Mara wondered if he really would go without one kind word. She
thought of all the years they had been together, and how he had been her
only thought and love. What had become of her brother?--the Moses that
once she used to know--frank, careless, not ill-tempered, and who
sometimes seemed to love her and think she was the best little