The Reverend Doctor knew this forlorn way of Mr. Fairweather’s, and was not troubled by it.  He proceeded to relate the circumstances of his visit from the old black woman, and the fear she was in about the young girl, who being a parishioner of Mr. Fairweather’s, he had thought it best to come over and speak to him about old Sophy’s fears and fancies.

In telling the old woman’s story, he alluded only vaguely to those peculiar circumstances to which she had attributed so much importance, taking it for granted that the other minister must be familiar with the whole series of incidents she had related.  The old minister was mistaken, as we have before seen.  Mr. Fairweather had been settled in the place only about ten years, and, if he had heard a strange hint now and then about Elsie, had never considered it as anything more than idle and ignorant, if not malicious, village-gossip.  All that he fully understood was that this had been a perverse and unmanageable child, and that the extraordinary care which had been bestowed on her had been so far thrown away that she was a dangerous, self-willed girl, whom all feared and almost all shunned, as if she carried with her some malignant influence.

He replied, therefore, after hearing the story, that Elsie had always given trouble.  There seemed to be a kind of natural obliquity about her.  Perfectly unaccountable.  A very dark case.  Never amenable to good influences.  Had sent her good books from the Sunday-school library.  Remembered that she tore out the frontispiece of one of them, and kept it, and flung the book out of the window.  It was a picture of Eve’s temptation; and he recollected her saying that Eve was a good woman,—­and she’d have done just so, if she’d been there.  A very sad child, very sad; bad from infancy.  He had talked himself bold, and said all at once, “Doctor, do you know I am almost ready to accept your doctrine of the congenital sinfulness of human nature?  I am afraid that is the only thing which goes to the bottom of the difficulty.”

The old minister’s face did not open so approvingly as Mr. Fairweather had expected.

“Why, yes,—­well,—­many find comfort in it,—­I believe;—­there is much to be said,—­there are many bad people,—­and bad children,—­I can’t be so sure about bad babies,—­though they cry very malignantly at times,—­especially if they have the stomach-ache.  But I really don’t know how to condemn this poor Elsie; she may have impulses that act in her like instincts in the lower animals, and so not come under the bearing of our ordinary rules of judgment.”

“But this depraved tendency, Doctor,—­this unaccountable perverseness.  My dear Sir, I am afraid your school is in the right about human nature.  Oh, those words of the Psalmist, ‘shapen in iniquity,’ and the rest!  What are we to do with them,—­we who teach that the soul of a child is an unstained white tablet?”