ds of her fancy. This would not have been so bad
if she had come down safely; but a branch broke, and she fell and hurt
herself, which alarmed Miss Victoria very much. Then Miss Victoria
used to send her on errands to develop her intelligence; but Beth
invariably lost herself at first; if she only had to turn the corner,
she could not find her way back. Aunt Victoria tried to teach her to
note little landmarks in her own mind as she went along, such as the
red pillar-box at the corner of the street where she was to turn, and
the green shutters on the house where she was to cross; and Beth
noticed these and many more things carefully as she went, and could
describe their position accurately afterwards; but, by the time she
turned, the vision and the dream would be upon her as a rule, and she
would walk in a world of fancy, utterly oblivious of red pillar-boxes,
green shutters, or anything else on earth, until she was brought up
wondering by a lamp-post, tree, or some unoffending person with whom
she had collided in her abstraction; then she would have to ask her
way; but she was slow to find it by direction; and all the time she
was wandering about, Aunt Victoria would be worrying herself with
fears for her safety until she was quite upset.

Beth was rebellious, too, about some things. There was a grocery shop
at one end of the street, kept by a respectable woman, but Beth
refused to go to it because the respectable woman had a fussy little
Pomeranian dog, and allowed it to lick her hands and face all over,
which so disgusted Beth that she could not eat anything the woman
touched. It was in this shop that Beth picked up the moribund black
beetle that kicked out suddenly, and set up the horror of crawling
things from which she ever afterwards suffered. This was another
reason for not going back to the shop, but Aunt Victoria could not
understand it, and insisted on sending her. Beth was firmly naughty in
the matter, however, and would not go, greatly to the old lady's
discomposure.

One means of torture, unconsciously devised by Aunt Victoria, tried
Beth extremely. Aunt Victoria used to send her to church alone on
Sunday afternoons to hear a certain eloquent preacher, and required
her to repeat the text, and tell her what the whole sermon was about
on her return. Beth did her best, but if she managed to remember the
text by repeating it all the time, she could not attend to the sermon,
and if she attended to the sermon,