come for me in two hours."

It was strange to see the little figure giving its orders, and settling
itself with the preciseness of an old man at the study-table; but still
this removed somewhat of the painful shyness and uncomfortableness from
every body, and especially from Mr. Cardross. He sat himself down in
his familiar arm-chair, and looked across the table at his poor little
pupil, who seemed at once so helpless and so strong.

Lessons begun. The child was exceedingly intelligent--precociously,
nay, preternaturally so, it appeared to Mr. Cardross, who, like many
another learned father, had been blessed with rather stupid boys, who
liked any thing better than study, and whom he had with great labor
dragged through a course of ordinary English, Latin, and even a fragment
of Greek. But this boy seemed all brains. His cheeks flushed, his eyes
glittered, he learned as if he actually enjoyed learning. True, as Mr.
Cardross soon discovered, his acquirements were not at all in the
regular routine of education; he was greatly at fault in many simple
things; but the amount of heterogeneous and out-of-the-way knowledge
which he had gathered up, from all available sources, was quite
marvelous. And, above all, to teach a boy unto whom learning seemed a
pleasure rather than a torment, a favor instead of a punishment, was
such an exceeding and novel delight to the good minister, that soon he
forgot the crippled figure--the helpless hands that sometimes with
fingers, sometimes even with teeth, painfully guided the ingeniously cut
forked stick, and the thin face that only too often turned white and
weary, but quickly looked up, as if struggling against weakness, and
concentrating all attention on the work that was to be done.

At twelve o'clock Helen came in with her father's lunch--a foaming