“Let me see whether you are a clairvoyant!”

“On one occasion when a sign for a children’s school was needed, and the lady teacher applied to Lamb to suggest a design, he meekly advised that of ‘The Murder of the Innocents.’  Thank you, sir.  However, I am not surprised that you entertain such flattering opinions of a profession which in England boasts ‘Squeers’ as its national type and representative.”

The young man laughed good-humoredly, and answered: 

“For the honor of my worthy pedagogical countrymen, permit me to assure you that the aforesaid ‘Squeers’ is simply one of Dickens’s inimitable caricatures.”

“Nevertheless I have somewhere seen the statement that when ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ first made its appearance, only six irate schoolmasters went immediately to London to thrash the author; each believing that he recognized his own features in the amiable portrait of ‘Squeers.’”

She bowed and turned from the table, but Mrs. Andrews exclaimed: 

“Before you go, repeat that passage from Rogers; then we will excuse you.”

With one hand clasping Hattie’s, and the other resting on the back of her chair, Edna fixed her eyes on Mrs. Andrews’s face, and gave the quotation.

“His house she enters, there to be a light Shining within when all without is night; A guardian angel o’er his life presiding, Doubling his pleasures and his cares dividing; Winning him back, when mingling in the throng From a vain world we love, alas! too long, To fireside happiness and hours of ease, Blest with that charm, the certainty to please.  How oft her eyes read his! her gentle mind To all his wishes, all his thoughts inclined; Still subject—­ever on the watch to borrow Mirth of his mirth, and sorrow of his sorrow.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

Flowery as Sicilian meads was the parsonage garden on that quiet afternoon late in May, when Mr. Hammond closed the honeysuckle-crowned gate, crossed the street, and walked slowly into the church-yard, down the sacred streets of the silent city of the dead, and entered the enclosure where slept his white-robed household band.

The air was thick with perfume, as if some strong, daring south wind had blown wide the mystic doors of Astarte’s huge laboratory, and overturned the myriad alembics, and deluged the world with her fragrant and subtle distillations.

Honey-burdened bees hummed their hymns to labor, as they swung to and fro; and numbers of Psyche-symbols, golden butterflies, floated dreamily in and around and over the tombs, now and then poising on velvet wings, as if waiting, listening for the clarion voice of Gabriel, to rouse and reanimate the slumbering bodies beneath the gleaming slabs.  Canary-colored orioles flitted in and out of the trailing willows, a redbird perched on the brow of a sculptured angel guarding a child’s grave, and poured his sad, sweet, monotonous notes on the spicy air; two purple pigeons, with rainbow necklaces, cooed and fluttered up and down from the church belfry, and close under the projecting roof of the granite vault, a pair of meek brown wrens were building their nest and twittering softly one to another.