angrily reproved. Affection can not display itself unless called forth; and so the very outward seeming of children is more in a parent's hand than mere superficial observers may believe: and Mrs. Fortescue blamed and disliked the cold inanimate exterior which she had never tried to warm.

Ellen's extreme difficulty in acquiring knowledge, compared with Edward's extraordinary quickness, only confirmed her painful conviction of her great inferiority, the impossibility of her ever winning love—and the consequent increased intensity of her affection for her father and brother, who loved her notwithstanding. That the child herself could not have defined these sensations is true, but that they had existence, even before she was nine years old, and that they influenced many years of her after-life, causing error and suffering, and rendering Mrs. Hamilton's task one of pain and difficulty, before these mistaken influences could be eradicated, is equally so. The power over early years is so immense, its responsibility so extensive, its neglect or abuse may indeed make the earnest thinker tremble; less, perhaps, for the actual amount of general evil, for that circumstances in after life are sometimes graciously permitted to avert, but for individual suffering and individual joy—and especially is this the case in the training of girls. More enduring in their very fragility than boys, they may be compared to those precious metals which fire and water and pressure have no power to break, but simply to draw out to a thinner and thinner thread, dwindling more and more, but to its last spider-woven fineness capable of tenuity and vitality. While boys, like men, are often crushed at once—the frame of the one and the spirit of the other equally unable to endure.

CHAPTER VI.

DOMESTIC DISCORD AND ITS END.

The displeasure of her husband, his reproaches for her conduct to Ellen, by causing some degree of annoyance, increased Mrs. Fortescue's feelings of dislike toward the object who had caused it, and this was soon afterward heightened by self-reproach.

A malignant fever broke out in the British settlement where Colonel Fortescue was stationed; his wife and children were with him, and, dreadfully alarmed, Eleanor determined to remove with her children to some less unhealthy spot. The colonel willingly consented; but before their hasty preparations were concluded Ellen sickened. Alarm for Edward, however, so engrossed the mother, that she appeared incapable of any other thought. In vain Colonel Fortescue urged that his son would be safe with the friends who had promised to take charge of him, and who were on the point of leaving the city; that