like an angel’s in my ear, and I have got up and gone out sick and disgusted.  Your face has risen up calm and white and still, between the faces of poor lost creatures who know no better way of life than to tempt us to sin.  And sometimes, Mary, when I have seen girls that, had they been cared for by good pious mothers, might have been like you, I have felt as if I could cry for them.  Poor women are abused all the world over; and it’s no wonder they turn round and revenge themselves on us.

“No, I have not been bad, Mary, as the world calls badness.  I have been kept by you.  But do you remember you told me once, that, when the snow first fell and lay so dazzling and pure and soft, all about, you always felt as if the spreads and window-curtains that seemed white before were dirty?  Well, it’s just like that with me.  Your presence makes me feel that I am not pure,—­that I am low and unworthy,—­not worthy to touch the hem of your garment.  Your good Dr. H. spent a whole half-day, the other Sunday, trying to tell us about the beauty of holiness; and he cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told us what it wasn’t, and what was like it, and wasn’t; and then he built up an exact definition, and fortified and bricked it up all round; and I thought to myself that he’d better tell ’em to look at Mary Scudder, and they’d understand all about it.  That was what I was thinking when you talked to me for looking at you in church instead of looking towards the pulpit.  It really made me laugh in myself to see what a good little ignorant, unconscious way you had of looking up at the Doctor, as if he knew more about that than you did.

“And now as to your Doctor that you think so much of, I like him for certain things, in certain ways.  He is a great, grand, large pattern of a man,—­a man who isn’t afraid to think, and to speak anything he does think; but then I do believe, if he would take a voyage round the world in the forecastle of a whaler, he would know more about what to say to people than he does now; it would certainly give him several new points to be considered.  Much of his preaching about men is as like live men as Chinese pictures of trees and rocks and gardens,—­no nearer the reality than that.  All I can say is, ’It isn’t so; and you’d know it, Sir, if you knew men.’  He has got what they call a system—­just so many bricks put together just so; but it is too narrow to take in all I see in my wanderings round this world of ours.  Nobody that has a soul, and goes round the world as I do, can help feeling it at times, and thinking, as he sees all the races of men and their ways, who made them, and what they were made for.  To doubt the existence of a God seems to me like a want of common sense.  There is a Maker and a Ruler, doubtless; but then, Mary, all this invisible world of religion is unreal to me.  I can see we must be good, somehow,—­that if we are not, we shall not be happy here or hereafter.  As to all