ght
tears to her eyes, it was such a contrast to the dimness of Aunt
Hannah's low ceilings and small rooms. Wherever she turned her head,
too, another Susan stared at her, and this made her feel shy and
uncomfortable.

"Isn't it a beautiful room?" said Margaretta, seating herself on a
pompous yellow sofa. "So cheerful!"

Before Susan could answer, Mrs Winslow came in. She was a fair lady
with a very straight nose, and she welcomed them kindly, and asked after
Sophia Jane.

"My little people," she continued, scarcely waiting, Susan noticed, for
Margaretta's answer, "are just returning from their walk. Air and light
are as necessary to the young as to flowers, are they not? How can we
expect their minds to expand unless the body is healthy?"

"No, indeed," said Margaretta.

Mrs Winslow then proposed that they should go and take off their hats,
which being done she led the way down-stairs into the dining-room, where
the "little people" were already assembled with their governess for
their early dinner. During this Susan had plenty of time for
observation, and she soon decided that she should have to tell Sophia
Jane that they were _not_ nicer in-doors than out. They were
wonderfully alike: all had little straight noses, fair complexions, and
pale blue eyes, and when they spoke they said all their words very
distinctly, and never cut any of them short. They were very polite to
Susan.

"I encourage conversation with my children during meal-time, on
principle," said Mrs Winslow. "How can you expect them to acquire
right habits of speaking if silence is imposed?"

"No, indeed," said Margaretta again.

"The force of habit," continued Mrs Winslow, putting down her knife and
fork, and looking from Margaretta to Miss Pink, the governess, "has
never, it seems to me, been sufficiently considered in education. It in
a giant power. It rests with us to turn it this way or that, to give it
a right or a wrong direction, to use it for good or for evil. I say to
my children, for instance, `always think before you act, in the smallest
as well as the greatest things.' By degrees I thus form in them habits
of steadiness, thoughtfulness, calmness, which will not desert them when
called upon to act in moments of danger and difficulty. `Train up a
child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart
from it'--nay more, he _cannot_ depart from it."

It was quite by chance as Mrs Winslow said these last wo