"No, no," cried Miss Thusa, making use of the most powerful restoratives as she spoke, "it will not hurt her. She is coming to already. It's a lesson she must learn, and the sooner the better. She's got to be hardened--and if we don't begin to do it the Lord Almighty will. I remember the saying of an old lady, and she was a powerful wise woman, that they who refused to look at a corpse, would see their own every night in the glass." "Repeat not such shocking sayings before the child," cried Mr. Gleason. "I fear she has heard too many already." Ah, yes! _she had heard too many_. The warning came too late. She was restored to animation and--to memory. Her father, now trembling for her health, and feeling his affection and tenderness increase in consequence of a sensibility so remarkable, forbid every one to allude to her mother before her, and kept out of her sight as far as possible the mournful paraphernalia of the grave. But a _cold presence_ haunted her, and long after the mother was laid in the bosom of earth, it would come like a sudden cloud over the sun, chilling the warmth of childhood. She had never yet been sent to school. Her extreme timidity had induced her mother to teach her at home the rudiments of education. She had thus been a kind of _amateur_ scholar, studying pictures more than any thing else, and never confined to any particular hours or lessons. About six months after her mother's death, her father thought it best she should be placed under regular instruction, and she was sent with Mittie to the village school. If she could only have gone with Louis--Louis, so brave, yet tender, so manly, yet so gentle, how much happier she would have been! But Louis went to the large academy, where he studied Greek and Latin and Conic Sections, &c., where none but boys were admitted. The teacher of the village school was a gentleman who had an equal number of little boys and girls under his charge. In summer the institution was under the jurisdiction of a lady--in autumn and winter the Salic law had full sway, and man reigned supreme on the pedagogical throne. It was in winter that Helen entered what was to her a new world. The little, delicate, pensive looking child, clad in deep mourning, attracted universal interest. The children gathered round her and examined her as they would a wax doll. There was something about her so different from themselves, so different from every body else they had seen, that they looked upon her as a natural curiosity. "What big eyes she's got!" cried a little creature, whose eyes were scarcely larger than pin-holes, putting her round, fat face close to Helen's pale one, and peering under her long lashes. "Hush!" said another, whose nickname was Cherry-cheeks, so bright and ruddy was her bloom. "She's a thousand times prettier than you, you little no eyed thing! But what makes her so pale and thin? I wonder--and what makes her look so scared?"