Aunt Janet was studious and intellectual, and had exercised a great influence in the development of her niece’s mind. It was she who had formed her tastes, and in a great measure moulded her intellect, while it was yet plastic, on her own exalted pattern. Mildred’s father had been but too glad to confide his only child to her care, and the event proved his wisdom and her salvation, for the devotion of Aunt Janet’s life had found its reward in the beautiful flower of Mildred’s intellectual and moral life, which seemed a reflex of her own. Blessed with Nature’s best endowment at starting, a robust and healthy frame, which often implies a vigorous and healthy mind, Aunt Janet had the initial impetus within her from childhood which kept her always aiming after the noblest and best standard of the good and true. A tendency of phthisis is not the sole cause and stimulus of the religious sentiment, and the strumous diathesis is not the only reason why children take instinctively to books instead of athletics, as some maintain. Certainly none of these things were the causes of Aunt Janet’s devotion to letters, and her constant desire to do something to advance the interests of mankind. The vigour of her thinking capacity, her rapidity in grasping the idea of a subject, her instinctive apprehension of the right way to the essence of things, was equalled by the physical capacity for continued work, and the strain which her system could bear without breaking down or depressing her industry. She was witty, and superabounding in good humour; never dull, never—like so many brilliant leaders of society—the subject of reaction after unusual efforts to amuse and enjoy; but so even, so constant in mental, as in physical health, that all her friends sought her in seasons of depression and mental discomfort, feeling that some subtle healing power for their minds would restore and reinvigorate them. Her niece could have had no better training than the mere daily contact with so normal a mind. Subject of late to fits of melancholy, musing despondently on what she called her unsatisfied longings for a higher life, she was yet daily growing, though she knew it not, into the perfect woman, nourished by all the elements necessary to build up a capacity for a great world’s-work.