Helen had no idea that she had genius. Whether chasing the butterfly or
talking fond fancies to her birds, or whether with earnest, musing eyes
watching the stars come forth, and the dark pine-trees gleam into silver;
whether with airy daydreams and credulous wonder poring over the magic
tales of Mirglip or Aladdin, or whether spellbound to awe by the solemn
woes of Lear, or following the blind great bard into "the heaven of
heavens, an earthly guest, to draw empyreal air,"--she obeyed but the
honest and varying impulse in each change of her pliant mood, and would
have ascribed with genuine humility to the vagaries of childhood that
prompt gathering of pleasure, that quick-shifting sport of the fancy by
which Nature binds to itself, in chains undulating as melody, the lively
senses of genius.

While Helen, leaning on the vicar's arm, thus surrendered herself to the
innocent excitement of the moment, the vicar himself smiled and nodded to
his parishioners, or paused to exchange a friendly word or two with the
youngest or the eldest loiterers (those two extremes of mortality which
the Church so tenderly unites) whom the scene drew to its tempting
vortex, when a rough-haired lad, with a leather bag strapped across his
waist, turned from one of the gingerbread booths, and touching his hat,
said, "Please you, sir, I was a coming to your house with a letter."

The vicar's correspondence was confined and rare, despite his distant
children, for letters but a few years ago were costly luxuries to persons
of narrow income, and therefore the juvenile letter-carrier who plied
between the post-town and the village failed to excite in his breast that
indignation for being an hour or more behind his time which would have
animated one to whom the post brings the usual event of the day. He took
the letter from the boy's hand, and paid for it with a thrifty sigh as he
glanced at a handwriting unfamiliar to him,--perhaps from some clergyman