"Yes; lost faith in everything and everybody, except Mrs. Asbury. Emerson's atheistic fatalism is enough to unhinge human reason; he is a great and, I believe, an honest thinker, and of his genius I have the profoundest admiration. An intellectual Titan, he wages a desperate war with received creeds, and, rising on the ruins of systems, struggles to scale the battlements of truth. As for Parker, a careful perusal of his works was enough to disgust me. But no more of this, Beulah--so long as you have found nothing to rest upon. I had hoped much from your earnest search; but since it has been futile, let the subject drop. Give me that glass of medicine. Dr. Hartwell was here just before you came. He is morose and haggard; what ails him?" "I really don't know. I have not seen him for several months--not since August, I believe." "So I supposed, as I questioned him about you; and he seemed ignorant of your movements. Beulah, does not life look dreary and tedious when you anticipate years of labor and care? Teaching is not child's sport. Are you not already weary in spirit?" "No, I am not weary; neither does life seem joyless. I know that I shall have to labor for a support; but necessity always supplies strength. I have many, very many sources of happiness, and look forward, hopefully, to a life of usefulness." "Do you intend to teach all your days? Are you going to wear out your life over primers and slates?" "Perhaps so. I know not how else I shall more easily earn a subsistence." "I trust you will marry, and be exempted from that dull, tedious routine," said Cornelia, watching her countenance. Beulah made a gesture of impatience. "That is a mode of exemption so extremely remote that I never consider it. I do not find teaching so disagreeable as you imagine, and dare say at fifty (if I live that long) I shall still be in a schoolroom. Remember the trite line:" "'I dreamed, and thought that life was beauty I woke, and found that life was duty'" "Labor, mental and physical, is the heritage of humanity, and happiness is inseparably bound up with the discharge of duty. It is a divine decree that all should work, and a compliance with that decree insures a proper development of the moral, intellectual, and physical nature." "You are brave, Beulah, and have more of hope in your nature than I. For twenty-three years I have been a petted child; but life has given me little enjoyment. Often have I asked, Why was I created? for what am I destined? I have been like a gilded bubble, tossed about by every breath! Oh, Beulah! often, in the desolation of my heart, I have recalled that grim passage of Pollok's, and that that verily I was that "'Atom which God Had made superfluously, and needed not To build creation with, but back again To nothing threw, and left it in the void, With everlasting sense, that once it was!'"