Joanna led the way to a very neat little parlour, where Mr. and Mrs. Ross, with the tea-table placed before the latter, were waiting to receive them. Mr. Ross was a man far advanced in life, who in the early part of it had been accustomed to genteel society, was an excellent classical scholar, and well grounded in English literature of a superior class, as well as what is properly termed the Belles Lettres. He had greatly ameliorated the condition of his parishioners, by introducing industry and neatness in their habitations, yet he had merely tinctured the minds of Ellen and Joanna with a love of reading, justly conceiving that in their station of life much literary knowledge and refinement of taste would be worse than useless to them. The gay heart of Joanna had been well content to skim the mere surface; but Ellen, more serious, and with more native delicacy of taste, had often excited the anger of Mrs. Ross by the reluctance with which she left her studies, and tore herself from the polished pages of Addison and Pope, to sit down to heavy needlework, or make preserves. Every thing worthy of observation which Ellen heard or read she made her own, not only by the aid of memory, but by that happy nameless faculty which selects the best of every thing, and combining ideas with admirable facility, extracts knowledge and wit from what to common minds presents little better than an uninteresting blank. An old magazine in Ellen's hands became a commentary on the history of the times to which it belonged; and while other girls would have been idling over the tales, or puzzling themselves with the enigmas, it contained, she was selecting and classing a store of facts and characteristic anecdotes, which, with a very little assistance, would have been a foundation for the most accurate historical knowledge: thus, like the bee, from the most unpromising materials, Ellen extracted the honey, and left the refuse behind. In this manner, and with the aid of very few books, she had obtained a degree of information, which many women, whose educations are most anxiously attended to, never attain. Another circumstance was, that having no great variety of authors, she was obliged to repeat the perusal of those she was allowed to read, and by that means had time thoroughly to digest and comprehend them; whereas, the young people of the present day have such an endless variety of books offered to them, that nothing which has not the charm of novelty can be endured, and scarcely any merit can obtain a second reading.