hurch or at the
market-town, where she occasionally went on shopping expeditions, she
gave herself such airs as she considered suitable for a lady who must
gently, though graciously, repel all hopeless aspirations. She was one
of those people to whom a compliment is absolute poison. The first man
who casually chanced to say something to her in her early youth, which
announced to her that he thought her lovely, changed her thoughts about
herself for ever after. First, she accepted his compliment as his
sincere and fervent conviction. Secondly, she never doubted that he
expressed his continuous belief, not his feeling of the moment. Thirdly,
she regarded beauty in her case as thenceforward an established fact,
and not this one man's opinion. Fourthly, she spent some restless months
in persuading herself that to admire must needs be to love, and she
longed in vain to see him "come forward." Then some other casual
acquaintance paid her a compliment, and she went through the same
experience on his account, persuading herself that her first admirer
could not afford to marry; and this state of things had now gone on for
several years.

CHAPTER II.

THE LESSON.

"Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell, think ye...."

Many and many an hour had Peter spent, when he was a very little boy, in
gazing through the heavy banister-like railings of the gallery; and, as
he grew older, in pensively leaning upon them, and longing in vain to
get into the forbidden Paradise of the garden. The gallery floor being
about twelve feet from the ground he could see the whole place from it.
Oh the stores of nests that it must contain! the beautiful sharp sticks
for arrows! the capital elder shoots, full of pith! how he longed to get
at them for making pop-guns! Sometimes, when the pink hawthorns were in
flower, or the guelder-roses, he would throw a ball at one of them just
to see what showers of bloom would come down; and then what a commotion
such an event would make among the birds! what chattering and chirping,
and screaming and fluttering! But the experiment was rather a costly
one, for the ball once thrown there was no getting it back again, it
must lie and rot till the seams burst open, and birds picked the wool
out for their nests.

Sometimes Peter would get a hook tied to the end of a long string, and
amuse himself with what he called fishing, that is to say, he would
throw out his line, and try to get it tangled