Highgate seminaries. Everything joyous affected her, and at once,--air,
flowers, sunshine, butterflies. Unlike heroines in general, she very
seldom cried, and she saw nothing charming in having the vapours. But
she never looked so beautiful as in sleep; and as the light breath came
from her parted lips, and the ivory lids closed over those eyes which
only in sleep were silent,--and her attitude in her sleep took that
ineffable grace belonging solely to childhood, or the fresh youth into
which childhood merges,--she was just what you might imagine a sleeping
Margaret, before that most simple and gentle of all a poet's visions of
womanhood had met with Faust, or her slumbers been ruffled with a dream
of love.

We cannot say much for Lucy's intellectual acquirements; she could,
thanks to the parson's wife, spell indifferently well, and write a
tolerable hand; she made preserves, and sometimes riddles,--it was more
difficult to question the excellence of the former than to answer the
queries of the latter. She worked to the admiration of all who knew her,
and we beg leave to say that we deem that "an excellent thing in woman."
She made caps for herself and gowns for the poor, and now and then she
accomplished the more literary labour of a stray novel that had wandered
down to the Manorhouse, or an abridgment of ancient history, in which was
omitted everything but the proper names. To these attainments she added
a certain modicum of skill upon the spinet, and the power of singing old
songs with the richest and sweetest voice that ever made one's eyes
moisten or one's heart beat.

Her moral qualities were more fully developed than her mental. She was
the kindest of human beings; the very dog that had never seen her before
knew that truth at the first glance, and lost no time in making her
acquaintance. The goodness of her heart reposed upon her face like