intellectual: and I notice this _now_ with the more emphasis,
because I am coming rapidly upon ground where it will be seen that this
one qualification was of more summary importance to us--did us more
'yeoman's service' at a crisis the most awful--than other qualities of
greater name and pretension. _Hannah_ was this woman's Christian
name; and her name and her memory are to me amongst the most hallowed
of my earthly recollections.

One of her two fellow-servants, known technically amongst us as the
'parlor maid,' was also, but not equally, attached to her mistress; and
merely because her nature, less powerfully formed and endowed, did not
allow her to entertain or to comprehend any service equally fervid of
passion or of impassioned action. She, however, was good, affectionate,
and worthy to be trusted. But a third there was, a nursery maid, and
therefore more naturally and more immediately standing within the
confidence of her mistress--her I could not trust: her I suspected. But
of that hereafter. Meantime, Hannah, she upon whom I leaned as upon a
staff in all which respected her mistress, ran up stairs, after I had
spoken and received her answer, in order hastily to dress and prepare
herself for going out along with me to the city. I did not ask her to
be quick in her movements: I knew there was no need: and, whilst she
was absent, I took up, in one of my fretful movements of nervousness, a
book which was lying upon a side-table: the book fell open of itself at
a particular page; and in that, perhaps, there was nothing
extraordinary, for it was a little portable edition of _Paradise
Lost_; and the page was one which I must naturally have turned to
many a time: for to Agnes I had read all the great masters of
literature, especially those of modern times; so that few people knew
the high classics more familiarly: and as to the passage in question,
from its divine beauty I had read it aloud to her, perhaps, on fifty