rooms, which Mr. Davis had used as a reception room and a study. The
parlor had never been opened, and Helen promised herself a jolly
time superintending the fixing up of that; on the other side she had
already taken possession of the front room, symbolically at any
rate, by having her piano moved in and her music unpacked, and a
case emptied for the books she had brought from Germany. To be sure,
on the other side was still a dreary wall of theological treatises
in funereal black, but Helen was not without hopes that continued
doses of cheerfulness might cure her father of such incomprehensible
habits, and obtain for her the permission to move the books to the
attic.

To start things in that direction the girl now danced gaily into the
study where her father was in the act of writing "thirdly,
brethren," for his next day's sermon; and crying out merrily,

"Up, up my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double!"

she saluted her reverend father with the sweetest of kisses, and
then seated herself on the arm of his chair and gravely took his pen
out of his hand, and closed his inkstand. She turned over the
"thirdly, brethren," without blotting it, and recited solemnly:

"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good.
Than all the sages can!"

And then she laughed the merriest of merry laughs and added, "Daddy,