Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/740

734 — the moment I get too hungry to do my work well and have no money left. Should I think it a disgrace to take money from you? That would show a poverty of spirit such as I hope never to fall into. My sole reason for refusing now is that I do not need it."

But for all his loving words and assurances Clementina could not stay her tears. She, was not ready to weep, but now her eyes were as a fountain.

"See, then, for your tears are hard to bear, my daughter," he said, "I will take one of these golden ministers, and if it has flown from me ere you come, seeing that, like the raven, it will not return if once I let it go, I will ask you for another. It may be God's will that you should feed me for a time."

"Like one of Elijah's ravens," said Clementina, with an attempted laugh that was really a sob.

"Like a dove whose wings are covered with silver and her feathers with yellow gold," said the schoolmaster.

A moment of silence followed, broken only by Clementina's failures in quieting herself.

"To me," he resumed, "the sweetest fountain of money is the hand of love, but a man has no right to take it from that fountain except he is in want of it. I am not. True, I go somewhat bare, my lady; but what is that when my Lord would have it so?"

He opened again the bag, and slowly, reverentially indeed, drew from it one of the new sovereigns with which it was filled. He put it in a waistcoat pocket and laid the bag on the table.

"But your clothes are shabby, sir," said Clementina, looking at him with a sad little shake of the head.

"Are they?" he returned, and looked down at his lower garments, reddening and anxious. "I did not think they were more than a little rubbed, but they shine somewhat," he said. "They are indeed polished by use," he went on with a troubled little laugh: "but they, have no holes yet — at least none that are visible," he corrected. "If you tell me, my lady, if you honestly tell me, that my garments" — and he looked at the sleeve of his coat, drawing back his head from it to see it better — "are unsightly, I will take of your money and buy me a new suit." Over his coat-sleeve he regarded her, questioning.

"Everything about you is beautiful," she burst out. "You want nothing but a body that lets the light through." She took the hand still raised in his survey of his sleeve, pressed it to her lips, and walked with even more than her wonted state slowly from the room.

He took the bag of gold from the table and followed her down the stair. Her chariot was waiting her at the door. He handed her in, and laid the bag on the little seat in front.

"Will you tell him to drive home?" she said with a firm voice, and a smile which if any one care to understand let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer, shabby, un-London-like man for a fortune-teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room — not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but to the Lord himself.

 

 From The Victoria Magazine.

materials from which we may glean the character of Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, are scattered up and down a brief account of her life written by herself; and the indications which that remarkable production furnishes are most pointed and interesting. She was the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, lieutenant of the Tower of London, a man of good general ability, benevolence, trustworthiness, piety, and practical aptitude. Her mother, according to the daughter's account, was a woman of practical ability and steady piety. Her parents, from an early age, spared no cost to improve on her education. At four years of age, she could read English perfectly, and was characterized by the possession of a retentive memory. When she was only seven years old she was intently occupied with the acquisition of languages, music, dancing, writing, and needlework. Of these she avers that she absolutely hated the needle, that she profited very little by her tuitions in music and dancing, never practising them but when her masters were with her. She despised playing with other children, and seemed, in short, quite averse to everything but her book. "Every moment," she says, "I could steal from my play I would employ on any book I could find when my own were locked up from me." 