pretty young sister, dead since the boy's birth.

And now the wild, reckless, dissipated brother-in-law was dead,
too, and the child had been sent to her; to the aunt who did not
want him, who did not care for children, who had never forgiven
her sister her unfortunate marriage. "If he had only been a
girl," she sighed. What she believed to be a happy thought
entered her brain.

"I shall rear him," she promised herself, "just as if he were a
little girl; then he will be both a pleasure and a comfort to me,
and a companion for my loneliness."

Miss Minerva was strictly methodical; she worked ever by the
clock, so many hours for this, so many minutes for that.
William, she now resolved, for the first time becoming really
interested in him, should grow up to be a model young man,
a splendid and wonderful piece of mechanism, a fine, practical,
machine-like individual, moral, upright, religious. She was glad
that he was young; she would begin his training on the morrow.
She would teach him to sew, to sweep, to churn, to cook, and when
he was older he should be educated for the ministry.

"Yes," said Miss Minerva; "I shall be very strict with him just
at first, and punish him for the slightest disobedience or
misdemeanor, and he will soon learn that my authority is not to
be questioned."

And the little boy who had never had a restraining hand laid upon
him in his short life? He slept sweetly and innocently in the