On her way she passed Mr. Raymond’s pretty shrubbery, and stood for a while quite still by the white railings, looking at the group within—­Lucy and her cousin sitting under the trees on the green turf, with Harry and the rabbit close beside them.  Nelly thought she had never seen anything so pretty as Stella, with her rose-leaf complexion and sunny golden hair.  The two might have served a painter for a contrast, both as to externals and as to the effect of the surrounding influences which mould human life:  the one, from her cradle so tenderly and luxuriously nurtured, petted, and caressed; the other, accustomed from her earliest years to privation and hardship, to harsh tones and wicked words, to all the evil influences which surround a child left to pick up its education on the city streets.  Strange mystery of the “election of circumstances!”—­one of the strangest in our mystery-surrounded life, never to be cleared up till all crooked things shall be made straight.  Only let the privileged ones, whose lines have fallen in pleasant places, remember that “to whom much is given, of them much shall be required.”

A forlorn little figure Nelly looked as she strolled along the field-paths which Bessie had taken an hour before.  But she did not trouble herself much about externals, except when in company with others whose better attire made her painfully conscious of the defects in her own; and being of a nature open to every impression from surrounding objects, she was at that moment far from being an unhappy child.  It was not often that she was completely free to wander at will; and the fresh breezy fields, the sweet scents of the clover and the pines, the blue rippling river, and the cows that looked calmly at her with their patient, wistful eyes, were all novelties to the town child, whose first summer it was in the country.  Some faint recollections she still had of the grassy slopes of her native hills, in the days of her early childhood; but since then all her experiences of summer had been the hot, hard pavements and stifling dust of a large city.

She had never before extended her wanderings in the direction of Mill Bank Farm so far as to reach the ravine through which the little stream flowed into the river; and now, when she came to the edge of the steep slope and looked down into the luxuriant depth of foliage and fern and ragged moss-clad rock, she felt a sense of delight more intense than Bessie Ford or Lucy Raymond, familiar all their lives with such scenes, had ever experienced.  She stood spell-bound at first, and then, scrambling down among rock and fern, reached the little stream, and was soon wading about in its bed, enjoying the sensation of the soft, warm water flowing over her bare feet, and pulling the little flowering water-plants that raised their heads among the moss-grown logs and stones which lay in the bed of the stream.  Then she began to climb up on the other side, stopping to examine with admiring eyes every velvety cushion of moss, and cluster of tiny ferns, and fairy-like baby pine or maple, and picking with eager hands the wild roses and other blossoms which she espied among the tangled underwood.