Page:Traits and Trials.pdf/141

Rh all her faults, Mabel was kind-hearted and most affectionate. In the meantime his grand-daughter found the novelty of her situation, at the Misses Smythes', not so pleasant as novelties generally are.

The silence, the stillness, the order, to say nothing of the lessons, were very dreadful in Mabel's eyes. Then she had the mortification of being behind hand with the very youngest of her companions. She had no available knowledge. True, her habit of reading aloud to her grandfather had given her a stock of information really uncommon at her age; but it was very miscellaneous, and not at all useful as regarded her present course of study. The rest of the girls, finding that at the age of ten she could do nothing more than read and write, immediately set her down for a dunce, and a new feeling, that of timidity, interfered sadly with her progress—for Mabel was really a quick child.

All beginnings are very troublesome things, and such she found them. But all the early cares of education were nothing compared to her other sorrows. For the first time in her life she found herself utterly alone, an object neither of importance nor affection.

Shy, keenly alive to ridicule, and unaccustomed