There was never any more trouble for her in that household. They
made only two demands: that she eat whatever was put on the table
and love them. Whatever was put on the table was good; and they
were all lovable. They were one live, disorderly menagerie of
nothing but love. But love is not the only essential of life; and
its phenomena can be trying.

Here, then, in this remote neighborhood of plain farmers, in a
little district school situated on a mud road, Gabriella began
alone and without training her new life,--attempt of the Southern
girl to make herself self-supporting in some one of the
professions,--sign of a vast national movement among the women of
her people. In her surroundings and ensuing struggles she had much
use for that saving sense of humor which had been poured into her
veins out of the deep clear wells of her ancestors; need also of
that radiant, bountiful light which still fell upon her from the
skies of the past; but more than these as staff to her young hands,
cup to her lips, lamp to her feet, oil to her daily bruises, rest
to her weary pillow, was reliance on Higher Help. For the years--
and they seemed to her many and wide--had already driven
Gabriella, as they have driven countless others of her sex, out of
the cold, windy world into the church: she had become a Protestant
devotee. Had she been a Romanist, she would long ere this have been
a nun. She was now fitted for any of those merciful and heroic
services which keep fresh on earth the records of devoted women.
The inner supporting stem of her nature had never been snapped; but
it had been bruised enough to give off life-fragrance. Adversity
had ennobled her. In truth, she had so weathered the years of a
Revolution which had left her as destitute as it had left her free,
that she was like Perdita's rosemary: a flower which keeps seeming