Being then pious, madame had hung about her walls short texts in fancy lettering, with a great deal of scroll-work in gold and carmine to make them look pretty. When she came into possession of Leam's mind, she was shocked at her ignorance of all the sayings that were so familiar to herself and other persons of respectability. Leam knew nothing but a few barbarous prayers to saints, used more after the fashion of charms than anything else, the ave and the paternoster said incorrectly and not understood when said. Wherefore madame caused to be illuminated some texts for her room too, as lessons always before her eyes, and counter-charms to those heathenish invocations in which the child put her sole faith and trust of salvation. And among other things she gave her the Ten Commandments, very charmingly done. Round each commandment were pictures, emblems, symbolic flowers, all enclosed in fancy scroll-work of an elaborate kind. Really, it was a very creditable piece of bastard art, and Mr. Dundas was moved almost to tears by it. Madame did it herself--so she said with a tender little smile--as her pleasant surprise for poor dear Leam on her fifteenth birthday. And Leam was so far tamed in that she suffered the Tables to be hung up in her bedroom, and even found pleasure in looking at them. The pictures of Ruth and Naomi; of the thief running away with the money-bags; of a woman lying prostrate with long hair, and a broken lily at her side; of a murdered man prone in the snow, and a frightened-looking bravo, half covering his face in his cloak, fleeing away in the darkness, with a bowl marked "poison" and a dagger dripping with blood in the margin,--all these pictures, which stood against the commandments they illustrated, fascinated her greatly. The colors and the gilding, the flowers and the emblems, pleased her, and she took the texts sandwiched between as the jalap in the jam. At first she thought it impious to have them there at all, because they were in the Bible, and mamma used to say that good Christians never read the Bible. It was a holy book which only priests might use, and when those pigs of Protestants looked into it and read it, just as they would read the newspaper, they profaned it. But by force of habit she reconciled herself to the profanity, and by frequent looking at the art got the literature into her head. And when it was there she did not find anything in it to be afraid of or to condemn as too mysteriously holy for her knowledge. All of which was so much to the good; and Mr. Dundas had no words strong enough whereby to express his gratitude to the fair woman who had saved his child from destruction by giving her the Ten Commandments made pretty by adjuncts of bastard art.