A SELF-WILLED, proud, ambitious woman, with a strong, clear, bold intellect, a passionate temper, and vehement feelings, Martha Muir had been born. So much education as she had, tended all to reduce her to the due humility of poverty and womanhood, but surrounded always by placid natures, who never fully comprehended the stormy spirit with which they had to deal, Martha, dwelling alone, and hiding in her own heart the secret aspirations which no one round her could have understood, remained as proud, as self-willed, and as ambitious as she had been born. For hers were not the hopes and fancies common, as people say, to youthful women. Advantages of appearance she had never possessed, and the children who were growing up at her feet absorbed all the passionate affections of their grave sister; but Martha’s hopes were visions of unmitigated ambition, eager to work out for itself a future worthy of its own bold spirit--for it was not of windfalls, or happy chances, or of fortune to be bestowed on her by another, but of that ladder “to which the climber upward turns his face,” that the solitary woman dreamed. To raise them--these children--to that indefinite rank and honour which exists in the fancy of the young who are poor--to win for them exemption from those carking cares amid which her own youth, a strong plant, had grown green and flourished. Such hopes were strong in the heart of the passionate girl when people round her thought her only a child; and when darker necessities came--when following many little pilgrims, the father and the mother went away, leaving her the head of the sadly diminished family, her strong desire, intensified by great grief, possessed her like a fiery tormenting spirit. She was then a woman of only twenty years, while Harry was but thirteen; and Martha prayed in an agony for means--only means, to let her strong energies forth and labour for her children: but the means never came--how could they? and all she could do in her passion of ambitious love was to toil day and night for their bread.