little wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and
proceeded to knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape
of a silk purse. As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just
such purses before; indeed, I was the possessor of one. Their
peculiar excellence, besides the great delicacy and beauty of the
manufacture, lay in the almost impossibility that any uninitiated
person should discover the aperture; although, to a practised touch,
they would open as wide as charity or prodigality might wish. I
wondered if it were not a symbol of Priscilla's own mystery.

Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired
her, our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm. When the
strong puffs of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made
the oaken frame of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us
apprehensively, as if to inquire whether these tempestuous outbreaks
did not betoken some unusual mischief in the shrieking blast. She
had been bred up, no doubt, in some close nook, some inauspiciously
sheltered court of the city, where the uttermost rage of a tempest,
though it might scatter down the slates of the roof into the bricked
area, could not shake the casement of her little room. The sense of
vast, undefined space, pressing from the outside against the black
panes of our uncurtained windows, was fearful to the poor girl,
heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits, with the
lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street. The
house probably seemed to her adrift on the great ocean of the night.
A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of
nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its
limitless extent. Once, while the blast was bellowing, she caught
hold of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of one who hears her
own name spoken at a distance, but is unutterably reluctant to obey