procession, with one of the sacred vessels in her hands; she might
have run in the Attic games, bare-limbed and fearless. Hers was a
soul that leaped to the call of joy, that thrilled at the faintest
touch of beauty. Above all else, she was born for music--she could
have sung so that the world would have remembered it. And she was
pent in a dingy boarding-house, with no point of contact with
anything about her--with no human soul to whom she could whisper her
despair!

They sent her to a public-school, where the sad-eyed drudges of the
traders came to be drilled for their tasks. They harrowed her with
arithmetic and grammar, which she abhorred; they taught her
patriotic songs, about a country to which she did not belong. And
also, they sent her to Sunday-school, which was worse yet. She had
the strangest, instinctive hatred of their religion, with all that
it stood for. The sight of a clergyman with his vestments and his
benedictions would make her fairly bristle with hostility. They
talked to her about her sins, and she did not know what they meant;
they pried into the state of her soul, and she shrunk from them as
if they had been hairy spiders. Here, too, they taught her to
sing--droning hymns that were a mockery of all the joys of life.

So Corydon devoured her own heart in secret; and in time a dreadful
thing came to happen--the stagnant soul beginning to fester. One day
the girl, whose heart was the quintessence of all innocence,
happened to see a low word scribbled upon a fence. And now--they had
urged her to discover sins, and she discovered them. Suppose that
word were to stay in her mind and haunt her--suppose that she were
not able to forget it, try as she would! And of course she tried;
and the more she tried, the less she succeeded; and so came the