This was an important year to Meeta. It brought her an acquaintance through whom her dormant intellect was aroused, and her manners fitted for something more than the rude life by which she had been hitherto surrounded. This was Mrs. Schwartz, the wife of a young pastor, who had come to assist Mr. Schmidt in those duties to which his advancing years rendered him unequal. Mrs. Schwartz was a woman of no ordinary stamp. Highly educated, with an intense enjoyment of every form of beauty and grace, she saw something of them embellishing the homeliest employments and most common life with which a sentiment of duty was connected. Severe illness had confined her to her bed for many weeks soon after her arrival, and before she had been able to establish that perfect domestic economy, which renders the daily and hourly inspection and interference of the mistress of a mansion needless to the comfort of its inmates. During this period, Meeta, whose sympathies had been deeply interested in the stranger, nursed her, and planned for her, and worked for her, until she made herself a place in her heart among her life-friends. As Mrs. Schwartz saw her moving around her with such busy kindness, the thought often arose in her mind, "What can I do for her?" This is a question we seldom ask ourselves of any one sincerely without finding an answer to it. We have said that Meeta had access to few books in early life; we might have added that she had little opportunity of hearing the conversation of persons more cultivated than herself. Thus were the two great sources of intellectual development sealed to her. She had a thoughtful, earnest mind. She loved the beautiful world around her, and the GREAT BEING who made and sustained that world. But if the contemplation of these things awakened thoughts of a higher character than the daily baking and brewing, milking and scrubbing in her father's house, she had no language in which to clothe them, and vague and undefined, they fleeted away like the morning mists, leaving no impress of their presence. Her acquaintance with Mrs. Schwartz, and the conversation she sometimes heard between her and her husband, gave to these shadows substance and form, and awakened a new want in Meeta's soul--the want of knowledge. As in all else, Ernest was present in this. He would doubtless be intelligent, wise, like Mr. Schwartz, and how could she be his companion? Something of these new experiences in Meeta was divined by Mrs. Schwartz, and with a true womanly tact she became her teacher without wounding her self-love. The road to knowledge once opened to Meeta, her advance on it was rapid. How could it be otherwise, when every step was bringing her nearer to Earnest! The elevation and refinement of mind which Meeta thus acquired impressed themselves on her agreeable features. Her dark eyes became bright with the soul's light, and her whole aspect so attractive, that her old friends exclaimed, as