looked like a horrible cell to put criminals into. The whole place was
festooned with cobwebs,--not light films, such as the housewife's broom
sweeps away before they have become a permanent residence, but vast gray
draperies, loaded with dust, sprinkled with yellow powder from the beams
where the worms were gnawing day and night, the home of old, hairy
spiders who had, lived there since they were eggs and would leave it for
unborn spiders who would grow old and huge like themselves in it, long
after the human tenants had left the mansion for a narrower home. Here
this little criminal was imprisoned, six, twelve,--tell it not to
mothers,--eighteen dreadful hours, hungry until she was ready to gnaw her
hands, a prey to all childish imaginations; and here at her stern
guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled, almost fainting, but
sullen and unsubdued. The Irishwoman, poor stupid Kitty Fagan, who had
no theory of human nature, saw her over the lean shoulders of the
spinster, and, forgetting all differences of condition and questions of
authority, rushed to her with a cry of maternal tenderness, and, with a
tempest of passionate tears and kisses, bore her off to her own humble
realm, where the little victorious martyr was fed from the best stores of
the house, until there was as much danger from repletion as there had
been from famine. How the experiment might have ended but for this
empirical and most unphilosophical interference, there is no saying; but
it settled the point that the rebellious nature was not to be subjugated
in a brief conflict.

The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities as she
grew older. At the age of four years she was detected in making a
cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time, and, on being reprimanded
for so doing, laughed out loud, so as to be heard by Father Pemberton,
who thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows upon the child, and, to
his shame be it spoken, had such a sudden uprising of weak, foolish,