’Melissa suffers all the time, and great pain.  She cannot amuse or employ herself in any way, and all these years has been as dependent on others for new thoughts, as for daily cares.  Yet her mind has deepened, and her character refined, under those stern teachers, Pain and Gratitude, till she has become the patron saint of the village, and the muse of the village school-mistress.  She has a peculiar aversion to egotism, and could not bear to have her mother enlarge upon her sufferings.

    ’"Perhaps it will pain the lady to hear that,” said the mild,
    religious sufferer, who had borne all without a complaint.

    “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”  The poor are the
    generous:  the injured, the patient and loving.

All that ——­ said of this girl was in perfect harmony with what De Maistre says of the saint of St. Petersburg, who, almost devoured by cancer, when, asked, “Quelle est la premiere grace que vous demanderez a Dieu, ma chere enfant, lorsque vous serez devant lui?” she replied, “Je lui demanderai pour mes bienfaiteurs la grace de Paimer autant que je l’aime.”

    ’When they were lamenting for her, “Je ne suis pas, dit elle,
    aussi malheureuse que vous le croyez; Dieu me fait la grace de
    ne peuser, qu’a lui."’ * *

’Next of Edith.  Tall, gaunt, hard-favored was this candidate for the American calendar; but Bonilacia might be her name.  From her earliest years she had valued all she knew, only as she was to teach it again.  Her highest ambition was to be the school-mistress; her recreation to dress the little ragged things, and take care of them out of school hours.  She had some taste for nursing the grown-up, but this was quite subordinate to her care of the buds of the forest.  Pure, perfectly beneficent, lived Edith, and never thought of any thing or person, but for its own sake.  When she had attained midway the hill of life, she happened to be boarding in the house with a young farmer, who was lost in admiration of her lore.  How he wished he, too, could read!  “What, can’t you read?  O, let me teach you!”—­“You never can; I was too thick-skulled to learn even at school.  I am sure I never could now.”  But Edith was not to be daunted by any fancies of incapacity, and set to work with utmost zeal to teach this great grown man the primer.  She succeeded, and won his heart thereby.  He wished to requite the raising him from the night of ignorance, as Howard and Nicholas Poussin did the kind ones who raised them from the night of the tomb, by the gift of his hand.  Edith consented, on condition that she might still keep school.  So he had his sister come to “keep things straight.”  Edith and he go out in the morning,—­he to his field, she to her school, and meet again at eventide, to talk, and plan and, I hope, to read also.

’The first use Edith made of her