Noah's Ark a burden, it had been a quiet amusement, demanding no
exertion, to see what little she could see of the old lady's life, and
to speculate about what she could not; to wonder and fancy what Mrs.
Overtheway looked like without her bonnet, and what she did with
herself when she was not at church. Ida's imagination did not carry
her far. She believed her friend to be old, immeasurably old,
indefinitely old; and had a secret faith that she had never been
otherwise. She felt sure that she wore a cap indoors, and that it was
a nicer one than Nurse's; that she had real tea, with sugar and cream,
instead of milk-and-water, and hot toast rather than bread-and-treacle
for tea; that she helped herself at meals, and went to bed according
to her own pleasure and convenience; was--perhaps on these very
grounds--utterly happy, and had always been so.

"I am only a little girl," said Ida, as she pressed her face sadly to
the cold window-pane. "I am only a little girl, and very sad, you
know, because Papa was drowned at sea; but Mrs. Overtheway is very
old, and always happy, and so I love her."

And in this there was both philosophy and truth.

It is a mistake to suppose that the happiness of others is always a
distasteful sight to the sad at heart. There are times in which life
seems shorn of interests and bereaved of pleasure, when it is a
relief, almost amounting to consolation, to believe that any one is
happy. It is some feeling of this nature, perhaps, which makes the
young so attractive to the old. It soothes like the sound of
harmonious music, the sight of harmonious beauty. It witnesses to a
conviction lying deep even in the most afflicted souls that (come what
may), all things were created good, and man made to be blessed; before