Jessie was as affectionate and warm-hearted as she was high-tempered and rebellious. Her tears were like April showers, and before Walter had been with her one half hour, all traces of the storm had disappeared, and in her own way she was cultivating his acquaintance, and occasionally inflicting upon him a pang by criticising some of his modes of speech. Particularly was she shocked at his favorite expression, "Darn it!" and looking wonderingly into his face, she said: "You mustn’t use such naughty words. Nobody but vulgar folks do that." Walter colored painfully, and that night, in the little diary which he kept, he wrote: "Resolved to break myself of using the word 'darn;’ not because a pert city miss wishes it, but because—" He didn’t know quite what reason to assign, so he left the sentence to be finished at some future time. In less than three weeks Jessie was the pet of the household, not even excepting Walter, whose prejudices gradually gave way, and who at last admitted that she would be "a niceish kind of a little girl, if she wasn’t so awful spunky." To no one of the family did Jessie take so kindly as to him. He had been the first to conquer her, and she clung to him with a childish, trusting love, whose influence he could not resist. Naturally full of life and fond of exercise, she was his constant companion in the fields and in the woods, where, fearless of complexion or dress, she gathered the rich butternuts, or sought among the yellow leaves for the brown chestnuts which the hoar frost had cast from their prickly covering. She liked the country, she said, and when her grandmother wrote, as she often did, begging her to come back, if only for a week, she absolutely refused to go, bidding Walter, who was her amanuensis, say that she liked staying where she was, and never meant to live in the city again. To Walter she was of inestimable advantage, for she cured him of more than one bad habit, both of word and manner, and though he, perhaps, would not have acknowledged it, he was very careful not to offend her ladyship by a repetition of the offense, until at last his schoolmates more than once called him stuck-up and proud, while even Ellen thought him greatly changed.