with them except under the charge of her mother, in whose presence the fiercest were submissive.  Jean, therefore, in speaking to her of family intercourse, of the intermingling of members of the household, of bright chat with friends, opened up to her views of life of which she had formed no conception.  Then he told her of his own people; described the three generations living under one roof; depicted the daily round, the care of the old and the young, the work, the return of the workers to their wives, sisters, and children, the love of the mothers for their infants, the reverence for age, the strong mutual affection of husband and wife, brother and sister.  To these descriptions she listened with a happy smile, the mission of woman dawning on her; and many were the questions she asked, till she seemed to have mastered the pictures painted for her.  Above all, Jean strained to bring her to the knowledge of the God of the Christian, for he himself was an earnest, intelligent disciple.  He found her mind clearer than he had expected.  Judith (this he now knew was the mother’s name) was a remarkable woman; her mind was lofty, if darkened.  While others were satisfied with the grossness of a material creed her spirit soared aloft.  Her Gods commanded her implicit faith, her unswerving allegiance.  Seated on the storm-clouds, sweeping through space, they represented to her infinite force.  She attributed to them no love for mankind, which was in her creed rather their plaything, but she credited them with the will and the power to scatter good and ill before they claimed the soul of the hero to their fellowship, or cast into a lower abyss that of the coward or the traitor.  She believed that she saw their giant forms half bending from their vapoury thrones, and she thought that she read their decrees.  Sorceress she may have been; in those days sorcery was attributed to many who had obtained a knowledge of laws of nature, then considered occult, now recognized among the guiding principles from which scientific deductions are drawn.  She believed in the power of magic, which she was universally understood to possess; but she was no vulgar witch:  rather was she a worthy priestess of her not ignoble deities.  The effect upon Hilda’s mind of the teachings of such a woman is easy to conceive.  She had been allowed to know little of the wild orgies of the barbaric feasts offered to the Gods by her countrymen, of their brutal excesses, of their human sacrifices:  from this knowledge she had been as far as possible shielded:  she knew only of the dim mystic beings, half men, half Gods, from whose wrath she shrank with terror.  To a mind so constituted and trained the revelation of the story of the infant Christ was a passionate pleasure.  She never tired of listening to the tale of the birth in the stable of Bethlehem; but she loved not to dwell on the history of the passion and death, which was at that time beyond her understanding.  She drank in with parted lips all that concerned the