--little arts which showed themselves in her as naturally as the gift of
tears and smiles. In fact, having no advantage of female intercourse,
she could not well have learnt them unless from crusty Hannah, who was
such an anomaly of a creature, with all her mixtures of race, that she
struck you as having lost all sex as one result of it. Yet this little
girl was truly feminine, and had all the manners and pre-eminently
uncriticisable tenets proper to women at her early age.

She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught
herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned; and
other knowledge had fallen upon her, as it were, by a reflected light
from him; or, to use another simile, had been spattered upon her by the
full stream which the Doctor poured into the vessel of the boy's
intellect. So that she had even some knowledge of the rudiments of
Latin, and geometry, and algebra; inaccurate enough, but yet with such
a briskness that she was sometimes able to assist Ned in studies in
which he was far more deeply grounded than herself. All this, however,
was more by sympathy than by any natural taste for such things; being
kindly, and sympathetic, and impressible, she took the color of what
was nearest to her, and especially when it came from a beloved object,
so that it was difficult to discover that it was not really one of her
native tastes. The only thing, perhaps, altogether suited to her
idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine, calculated for dainty
fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind of embroidery,
twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have before
said, she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic perhaps
of that creature's strange mixture of races.

Elsie seemed not only to have caught this art in its original spirit,
but to have improved upon it, creating strange, fanciful, and graceful