It was a very beautiful babe; the complexion soft, smooth, and very fair, with a faint pink tinge; the little, finely formed head covered with rings of golden hair that would some day change to the darker shade of her mother’s, whose regular features and large, soft brown eyes she inherited also.

“Sweet little flower blossomed into this world of sin and sorrow!  Elsie, dearest, remember that she is not absolutely yours, her father’s, or mine; but only lent you a little while to be trained up for the Lord.”

“Yes, papa, I know,” she answered with emotion, “and I gave her to Him even before her birth.”

“I hope she will prove as like you in temper and disposition as she bids fair to be in looks.”

“Papa, I should like her to be much better than I was.”

He shook his head with a half-incredulous smile.  “That could hardly be, if she has any human nature at all.”

“Ah, papa, you forget how often I used to be naughty and disobedient; how often you had to punish me; particularly in that first year after you returned from Europe.”

A look of pain crossed his features.  “Daughter, dear, I am full of remorse when I think of that time.  I fully deserved the epithet Travilla once bestowed upon me in his righteous indignation at my cruelty to my gentle, sensitive little girl.”

“What was that, papa?” she asked, with a look of wonder and surprise.

“Dinsmore, you’re a brute!”

“Papa, how could he say that!” and the fair face flushed with momentary excitement and anger towards the father of her child, whom she so thoroughly respected ind so dearly loved.

“Ah, don’t be angry with him,” said Mr. Dinsmore; “I was the culprit.  You cannot have forgotten your fall from the piano-stool which came so near making me childless?  It was he who ran in first, lifted you, and laid you on the sofa with the blood streaming from the wounded temple over your curls and your white dress.  Ah, I can never forget the sad sight, or the pang that shot through my heart with the thought that you were dead.  It was as he laid you down that Travilla turned to me with those indignant words, and I felt that I fully deserved them.  And yet I was even more cruel afterwards, when next you refused to obey when I bade you offend against your conscience.”

“Don’t let us think or talk of it any more, dear father; I love far better to dwell upon the long years that followed, full of the tenderest care and kindness.  You certainly can find nothing to blame yourself with in them.”

“Yes; I governed you too much.  It would probably have ruined a less amiable temper, a less loving heart, than yours.  It is well for parents to be sometimes a little blind to trivial faults.  And I was so strict, so stern, so arbitrary, so severe.  My dear, be more lenient to your child.  But of course she will never find sternness in either you or her father.”

“I think not, papa; unless she proves very head-strong; but you surely cannot mean to advise us not to require the prompt, cheerful, implicit obedience you have always exacted from all your children?”