they had either not been able to see, or, from carelessness, had
neglected to see, any peculiar wrong done to her in the matter which
occasioned her grief,--but had simply felt compassion for her as for
one summoned, in a regular course of providential and human
dispensation, to face an affliction, heavy in itself, but not heavy
from any special defect of equity. Consequently their very sympathy,
being so much built upon the assumption that an only child had offended
to the extent implied in his sentence, oftentimes clothed itself in
expressions which she felt to be not consolations but insults, and, in
fact, so many justifications of those whom it relieved her overcharged
heart to regard as the very worst of enemies. Agnes, on the other hand,
took the very same view of the case as herself; and, though otherwise
the gentlest of all gentle creatures, yet here, from the generous
fervor of her reverence for justice, and her abhorrence of oppression,
she gave herself no trouble to moderate the energy of her language: nor
did I, on my part, feeling that substantially she was in the right,
think it of importance to dispute about the exact degrees of the wrong
done or the indignation due to it. In this way it happened naturally
enough that at one and the same time, though little contemplating
either of these results, Agnes had done a prodigious service to the
poor desolate mother by breaking the force of her misery, as well as by
arming the active agencies of indignation against the depressing ones
of solitary grief, and for herself had won a most grateful and devoted
friend, who would have gone through fire and water to serve her, and
was thenceforwards most anxious for some opportunity to testify how
deep had been her sense of the goodness shown to her by her benign
young mistress, and how incapable of suffering abatement by time. It
remains to add, which I have slightly noticed before, that this woman
was of unusual personal strength: her bodily frame matched with her