"It is hard convincing you young people that even death may be a tender
friend, a welcome messenger. But we won't talk in this strain any longer,
I scarce know why we drifted into it. I want your first impressions of
home to be joyous, for they are apt to haunt us long after we make the
discovery that they were not correct."

"I wonder if you are not something of a philosopher? I never heard any
one talk just like you."

"Certainly not anything so formidable, and learned as that. I am only a
plain little woman, with no special mission except to make those around
me happy."

"That is a very beautiful mission, and I am sure you meet with success,
which is not the fate of every one with a career."

"Ah, if you begin praising me I must leave; but first let me tell you
dinner will be served at six. Mr. Winthrop is a great student, and is
already, for so young a man, a very successful author; and he likes
dinner late so as to have all the longer time for hard work. The evenings
he takes for light reading and rest."

I must confess I was beginning to get afraid of my guardian. I expected
to find him in manners and appearance something like our school
professors, with a tendency to criticise my slender literary
acquirements.

However I proceeded with my toilet quite cheerfully, and was rather glad
than sorry that I had found him absent from Oaklands; but after I left my
room and wandered out into the dim, spacious hall and down the long