Alfred Graham had already given evidence of precocious genius which seemed fully to justify Madeline’s ambition. Nature in his case had displayed her usual compensating kindness, and since she had bestowed on him a dwarfed and diminutive form, a delicate and fragile body, made amends by giving him a countenance of almost feminine beauty, and a mind filled with the most exquisite perceptions. He was born a poet. His fervid feelings, his nervous temperament, his delicate sense of beauty in the moral and physical world—even the very fragility of constitution which shut him out from the rude conflicts of real life, and confined him within the limits of the fairyland of reverie—all seemed to point out his future vocation. Too young to frame in numbers the fancies of his childish hours, he yet breathed into his sister’s ear the eloquent words of pure and passionless enthusiasm, and Madeline’s heart thrilled with high hopes of his future glory. But she did not suffer nature to direct his course. Long ere the child had seriously commenced the work of education, she had destined him to become an apostle of Christianity to the benighted world of paganism. Imaginative, high minded, stern, and self-sacrificing, Madeline was just such a woman as in the olden time might have embroidered the cross upon the mantle of her best beloved one, and sent him forth to fight the battles of the holy church. But the missionary of modern days has a far more difficult and therefore far nobler office to perform. Amid belted knights and men-at-arms to do battle with myriads of the Paynim foe is a lighter task than that which falls upon him, who goes forth alone and single handed to face the more insidious foes of ignorance and sin amid the blinded and perverse heathen. Yet such was the high and holy duty to which Madeline destined her brother, while her own ambition was limited to the hope of being the companion of his toils and his labors. She looked forward to the time when they should go forth hand in hand into the howling wilderness of superstition, with the gospel as a light to their feet and a lamp to their path, while they scattered the blessings of truth among the benighted idolaters of distant lands.