Long ago, when I was a child, I had learned, or taught myself, a thing which I could fain believe was not altogether superstitious. One day my father, who would still be talking of ancient things, and cared for little of more modern date than the Gospels, told me of a practice among the ancients by which they thought to look into the future. It was an evil practice, he said, because if these oracles were favourable, they advanced with blind confidence; and, if unfavourable, with a heart already prepared for certain defeat and death. Their method was nothing in the world but the opening of a Virgil anywhere, and accepting the first line which offered itself as a prophecy of the event of their undertaking. I was but a little thing when he told me this, but I pondered it in my mind, and I reasoned in this way (nothing doubting that the ancients did really in this manner read the future)-- "If these pagans could tell the event by consulting the words of Virgil, a heathen like unto themselves, how much more readily ought we to learn what is going to happen by consulting the actual Word of God?" Thereupon, without telling any one, I used to consult this oracle, probably by myself, in every little childish thing which interested me. It was a thing presumptuous, though in my childhood I did not know that it was a sin. Yet I did it on this very night--a grown-up woman--trying to get a help to soothe my mind. The moonlight was so bright that I could read at the open window without a candle. I had long since extinguished mine. I opened the Bible at random, kept my finger on a verse, and took the book to the casement. There I read-- "Wait on the Lord: be of good courage; and He shall strengthen thy heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord." Now these words I thankfully accepted as a solemn message from Heaven, an answer to my prayer. So I laid me down, and presently fell fast asleep. CHAPTER VIII. HOW KITTY HAD LETTERS AND VERSES. Everybody knows that a watering-place in summer is a nest of singing birds. I do not mean the birds of the air, nor the ladies who sing at the concerts, nor the virtuosos, male and female, who gather together to talk of appogiatura, sonata, and--and the rest of the musical jargon. I mean rather those epigrammatists, libellous imitators of Pasquin, and love-verse writers who abound at such places. Mostly they are anonymous, so that one cannot thank them as one would. The verses, this year at Epsom, came down upon us in showers. They were stuck up on the pillars of the porch of the Assembly Rooms, they were laid upon the table of the book-shop, they were handed about on the Terrace. Also they came to me at my lodgings, and to Nancy at hers, and very likely to Peggy Baker at hers. Here, for instance, is one set which were shown round at the Assembly-- "Epsom could boast no reigning Toast: The Terrace wept for pity. Kind Fortune said, 'Come, lift your head; I send you stately Kitty.'