To return from this digression. Perhaps my readers will wish to know more of poor Nanny, as she was called. Nothing was known of her early history. She had come from the mother country four years before, with this little child, then an infant, and had taken a lodging in the poor fisherman's hut. She said the little girl was her grandchild, and all her affections were centred in her. She was entirely reserved as to her previous history, and was irritated if any curiosity was expressed about it, though she sometimes gave out hints that she had been an accomplice and victim of some deed for which she felt remorse. As she was quite harmless, and the inhabitants were much scattered, she was unmolested, and earned a scanty living by picking berries, fishing, and helping those who were not quite as poor as herself. Edith visited her often, and Mr. Grafton, though she would not acknowledge him as a spiritual guide, ministered to all her temporal wants. CHAPTER IX. Thou changest not, but I am changed, Since first thy pleasant banks I ranged; The visions of my youth are past, Too bright, too beautiful, to last. BRYANT. More than two years had passed since Edith's visit to the old woman of the cliff. Changes had taken place in all the personages of my little tale; but in Edith they were most apparent. She who had sung all day as the birds sing, because she could not help it, at nineteen had learned to reflect and to analyze; a sensitive conscience had taken the place of spontaneous and impulsive virtue; and the same heart that could be happy all day long in nursing a young chicken, or watching the opening of a flower, or carrying food to a poor old woman, now closed her days with _thinking_, and moistened her pillow with unbidden tears. It is the natural course of womanhood. Ah! that we could always be children. We have seen that after Edith had learned the story of the Lady Ursula, she began to solve some of the mysteries of life. She had since turned over many of its leaves, all fair with innocence and truth, but she had not yet found an answer to the question, "Why do we suffer?" The change that had taken place in young Seymore was deeper and sterner, but not so apparent. Externally, he was the same beautiful youth that he was when we introduced him to our kind readers, in his attic. Since then, he had had much to struggle with; but poverty had not been his greatest temptation. He could not indeed hope to be exempt from the bitter experience of almost all who at that time were scholars. To this very day, the sons of clergymen, and many of the most distinguished men in New England, have held the plough in the intervals of their preparation for the university. How many poor mothers have striven, and labored, and denied themselves all but the bare necessaries of life, that their sons might gain that sole distinction in New England,--an education at one of the colleges.