worthless. But now, amid all the sombre coarseness of her father’s outward life, and of her own, Priscilla had a higher and imaginative life within. Some faint gleam thereof was often visible upon her face.

It was as if, in her spiritual visits to her brilliant sister, a portion of the latter’s brightness had permeated our dim Priscilla, and still lingered, shedding a faint illumination through the cheerless chamber, after she came back.

As the child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered strange things about Priscilla. The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale Western child. They fancied —