but these people seem to think it isn't genteel enough to be spoken
of here. I suppose it is all very elegant to go on like a set of
trained canaries, but it's very dull fun to watch them, and Hepsey's
stories are a deal more interesting to me."

Having come to this conclusion, after studying dilettanteism through
the crack of the door for some months, Christie left the "trained
canaries" to twitter and hop about their gilded cage, and devoted
herself to Hepsey, who gave her glimpses into another sort of life
so bitterly real that she never could forget it.

HEPSEY.

Friendship had prospered in the lower regions, for Hepsey had a
motherly heart, and Christie soon won her confidence by bestowing
her own. Her story was like many another; yet, being the first
Christie had ever heard, and told with the unconscious eloquence of
one who had suffered and escaped, it made a deep impression on her,
bringing home to her a sense of obligation so forcibly that she
began at once to pay a little part of the great debt which the white
race owes the black.

Christie loved books; and the attic next her own was full of them.
To this store she found her way by a sort of instinct as sure as
that which leads a fly to a honey-pot, and, finding many novels, she
read her fill. This amusement lightened many heavy hours, peopled
the silent house with troops of friends, and, for a time, was the
joy of her life.

Hepsey used to watch her as she sat buried in her book when the