self-help. This was the real desire of Christie's heart; this was to
be her lesson and reward, and to this happy end she was slowly yet
surely brought by the long discipline of life and labor.

Sitting alone there in the night, she tried to strengthen herself
with all the good and helpful memories she could recall, before she
went away to find her place in the great unknown world. She thought
of her mother, so like herself, who had borne the commonplace life
of home till she could bear it no longer. Then had gone away to
teach, as most country girls are forced to do. Had met, loved, and
married a poor gentleman, and, after a few years of genuine
happiness, untroubled even by much care and poverty, had followed
him out of the world, leaving her little child to the protection of
her brother.

Christie looked back over the long, lonely years she had spent in
the old farm-house, plodding to school and church, and doing her
tasks with kind Aunt Betsey while a child; and slowly growing into
girlhood, with a world of romance locked up in a heart hungry for
love and a larger, nobler life.

She had tried to appease this hunger in many ways, but found little
help. Her father's old books were all she could command, and these
she wore out with much reading. Inheriting his refined tastes, she
found nothing to attract her in the society of the commonplace and
often coarse people about her. She tried to like the buxom girls
whose one ambition was to "get married," and whose only subjects of
conversation were "smart bonnets" and "nice dresses." She tried to
believe that the admiration and regard of the bluff young farmers
was worth striving for; but when one well-to-do neighbor laid his