Mrs. Buxton did not make a set labor of teaching; I suppose she felt that
much was learned from her superintendence, but she never thought of doing
or saying anything with a latent idea of its indirect effect upon the
little girls, her companions. She was simply herself; she even confessed
(where the confession was called for) to short-comings, to faults, and
never denied the force of temptations, either of those which beset little
children, or of those which occasionally assailed herself. Pure, simple,
and truthful to the heart's core, her life, in its uneventful hours and
days, spoke many homilies. Maggie, who was grave, imaginative, and
somewhat quaint, took pains in finding words to express the thoughts to
which her solitary life had given rise, secure of Mrs. Buxton's ready
understanding and sympathy.

"You are so like a cloud," said she to Mrs. Buxton. "Up at the Thorn-tree,
it was quite curious how the clouds used to shape themselves, just
according as I was glad or sorry. I have seen the same clouds, that, when
I came up first, looked like a heap of little snow-hillocks over babies'
graves, turn, as soon as I grew happier, to a sort of long bright row of
angels. And you seem always to have had some sorrow when I am sad, and turn
bright and hopeful as soon as I grow glad. Dear Mrs. Buxton! I wish Nancy
knew you."

The gay, volatile, willful, warm-hearted Erminia was less earnest in all
things. Her childhood had been passed amid the distractions of wealth; and
passionately bent upon the attainment of some object at one moment, the
next found her angry at being reminded of the vanished anxiety she had
shown but a moment before. Her life was a shattered mirror; every part
dazzling and brilliant, but wanting the coherency and perfection of
a whole. Mrs. Buxton strove to bring her to a sense of the beauty of
completeness, and the relation which qualities and objects bear to each