spoiling
its conventional symmetry without restoring its natural beauty. If the
mind be tight-laced long enough, it is ruined as a model, just as the
body is; and throwing off the stays which restrained it, merely
exposes its deformities without remedying them; so that there is
nothing for the old generation but to remain in stays. Mrs. Caldwell,
with all her deformities, was just as heroic as she knew how to be.
She lived for her children to the extent of denying herself the bare
necessaries of life for them; and bore poverty and obscurity of a
galling kind without a murmur. She scarcely ever saw a soul to speak
to. Uncle James Patten and the Benyon family did not associate much
with the townspeople, and were not popular in the county; so that Mrs.
Caldwell had very few visitors. Of course it was an advantage to be
known as a relation of the great people of the place, although the
great people had a bad name; but then she was evidently a poor
relation, which made it almost a virtue to neglect her in a community
of Christians who only professed to love the Lord Himself for what
they could get. "You must worship God because He can give you
everything," was what they taught their children. Even the vicar of
the parish would not call on anybody with less than five hundred a
year. He kept a school for boys, which paid him more than cent. per
cent., but did nothing for his parishioners except preach sermons an
hour long on Sundays. Self-denial and morality were his favourite
subjects. He had had three wives himself, and was getting through a
fourth as fast as one baby a year would do it.

Mrs. Caldwell, left to herself, found her evenings especially long and
dreary. It was her habit to write her letters then, and read,
particularly in French and Italian, which, she had some vague notion,
helped to improve her mind. But she often wearied for a word, and
began to hear voices herself in the howling winter winds, and to brood
upon the possible meaning of her own dreams, and to wonder why a
solitary rook flew over her house in particular, and cawed twice as it
passed. Little things naturally become of great importance in such a
life, and Harriet kept up the supply; she being the connecting link
between Mrs. Caldwell and the outer world. She knew all that was
happening in the place, and she claimed to know all that was going to
happen; and by degrees the mistress as well as the maid fell into the
way of comparing events with the