whose bringing up nothing had been spared,—­a girl who had had governesses to teach her at the house, who had been indulged almost too kindly,—­a girl whose father had given himself, up to her, he being himself a pure and high-souled man?—­and yet this girl was accused in whispers of having been on the very verge of committing a fatal crime; she was an object of fear to all who knew the dark hints which had been let fall about her, and there were some that believed—­Why, what was this but an instance of the total obliquity and degeneration of the moral principle? and to what could it be owing, but to an innate organic tendency?

“Busy, grandpapa?” said Letty, and without waiting for an answer kissed his cheek with a pair of lips made on purpose for that little function,—­fine, but richly turned out, the corners tucked in with a finish of pretty dimples, the rose-bud lips of girlhood’s June.

The old gentleman looked at his granddaughter.  Nature swelled up from his heart in a wave that sent a glow to his cheek and a sparkle to his eye.  But it is very hard to be interrupted just as we are winding up a string of propositions with the grand conclusion which is the statement in brief of all that has gone before:  our own starting-point, into which we have been trying to back our reader or listener as one backs a, horse into the shafts.

“Video meliora, proboque,—­I see the better, and approve it; deteriora sequor, I follow after the worse; ’t is that natural dislike to what is good, pure, holy, and true, that inrooted selfishness, totally insensible to the claims of”—­

Here the worthy man was interrupted by Miss Letty.

“Do come, if you can, grandpapa,” said the young girl; “here is a poor old black woman wants to see you so much!”

The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so much of the world’s life and happiness.  “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness;” a man’s love is the measure of his fitness for good or bad company here or elsewhere.  Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all, the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes!

The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and laid the Quarto Cruden on it.  He rose from his desk, and, looking once more at the young girl’s face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to himself that she was a little angel,—­which was in violent contradiction to the leading doctrine of his sermon on Human Nature.  And so he followed her out of the study into the wide entry of the old-fashioned country-house.