secret unhappiness or other; and I was as gentle and soothing to her as it’s in my nature to be.  She was in to our house a good deal; she kept it pretty well out of Dan’s way, and I hoped she’d get over it sooner or later, and make up her mind to circumstances.  And I talked to her a sight about Dan, praising him constantly before her, though I couldn’t hear to do it; and finally, one very confidential evening, I told her that I’d been in love with Dan myself once a little, but I’d seen that he would marry her, and so had left off thinking about it; for, do you know, I thought it might make her set more price on him now, if she knew somebody else had ever cared for him.  Well, that did answer awhile:  whether she thought she ought to make it up to Dan, or whether he really did grow more in her eyes, Faith got to being very neat and domestic and praiseworthy.  But still there was the change, and it didn’t make her any the less lovely.  Indeed, if I’d been a man, I should have cared for her more than ever:  it was like turning a child into a woman:  and I really think, as Dan saw her going about with such a pleasant gravity, her pretty figure moving so quietly, her pretty face so still and fair, as if she had thoughts and feelings now, he began to wonder what had come over Faith, and, if she were really as charming as this, why he hadn’t felt it before; and then, you know, whether you love a woman or not, the mere fact that she’s your wife, that her life is sunk in yours, that she’s something for you to protect and that your honor lies in doing so, gives you a certain kindly feeling that might ripen into love any day under sunshine and a south wall.

* * * * *

METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY

XI.

Among the astounding discoveries of modern science is that of the immense periods which have passed in the gradual formation of our earth.  So vast were the cycles of time preceding even the appearance of man on the surface of our globe, that our own period seems as yesterday when compared with the epochs that have gone before it.  Had we only the evidence of the deposits of rock heaped above each other in regular strata by the slow accumulation of materials, they alone would convince us of the long and slow maturing of God’s work on the earth but when we add to these the successive populations of whose life this world has been the theatre, and whose remains are hidden in the rocks into which the mud or sand or soil of whatever kind on which they lived has hardened in the course of time,—­or the enormous chains of mountains whose upheaval divided these periods of quiet accumulation by great convulsions,—­or the changes of a different nature in the configuration of our globe, as the sinking of lands beneath the ocean, or the gradual rising of continents and islands above it,—­or the wearing of great river-beds,