and solitude.  Temperance and Aunt Merce took as much care of her as she would allow; but she preferred being alone most of the time.  Thus she acquired the fortitude of an Indian; pain could extort no groan from her.  It reacted on her temper, though, for after an attack she was exasperating.  Her invention was put to the rack to tease and offend.  I kept out of her way; if by chance she caught sight of me, she forced me to hear the bitter truth of myself.  Sometimes she examined me to learn if I had improved by the means which father so generously provided for me.  “Is he not yet tired of his task?” she asked once.  And, “Do you carry everything before you, with your wide eyebrows and sharp teeth?  Temperance, where’s the Buffon Dr. Snell sent me?  I want to classify Cass.”

“I’ll warrant you’ll find her a sheep,” Temperance replied.

“Sheep are innocent,” said Veronica.  “You may go,” nodding to me, over the book, and Temperance also made energetic signs to me to go, and not bother the poor girl.

Always regarding her from the point of view she presented, I felt little love for her; her peculiarities offended me as they did mother.  We did not perceive the process, but Verry was educated by sickness; her mind fed and grew on pain, and at last mastered it.  The darkness in her nature broke; by slow degrees she gained health, though never much strength.  Upon each recovery a change was visible; a spiritual dawn had risen in her soul; moral activity blending with her ideality made her life beautiful, even in the humblest sense.  Veronica! you were endowed with genius; but while its rays penetrated you, we did not see them.  How could we profit by what you saw and heard, when we were blind and deaf?  To us, the voices of the deep sang no epic of grief; the speech of the woods was not articulate; the sea-gull’s flashing flight, and the dark swallow’s circling sweep, were facts only.  Sunrise and sunset were not a paean to day and night, but five o’clock A.M. or P.M.  The seasons that came and went were changes from hot to cold; to you, they were the moods of nature, which found response in those of your own life and soul; her storms and calms were pulses which bore a similitude to the emotions of your heart!

Veronica’s habits of isolation clung to her; she would never leave home.  The teaching she had was obtained in Surrey.  But her knowledge was greater than mine.  When I went to Rosville she was reading “Paradise Lost,” and writing her opinions upon it in a large blank book.  She was also devising a plan for raising trees and flowers in the garret, so that she might realize a picture of a tropical wilderness.  Her tastes were so contradictory that time never hung heavy with her; though she had as little practical talent as any person I ever knew, she was a help to both sick and well.  She remembered people’s ill turns, and what was done for them; and for the well she remembered dates and suggested agreeable occupations—­gave them happy ideas.  Besides being a calendar of domestic traditions, she was weather-wise, and prognosticated gales, meteors, high tides, and rains.