Christian life -- Fiction; Conduct of life -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Forgot yourself!" said Miss Fortune: "I wish you'd forget yourself out
of my house. Please to forget the place where I am for to-day, anyhow;
I've got enough of you for one while. You had better go to Miss Alice
and get a new lesson, and tell her you are coming on finely."
Gladly would Ellen indeed have gone to Miss Alice, but as the next day
was Sunday she thought it best to wait. She went sorrowfully to her own
room. "Why couldn't I be quiet?" said Ellen. "If I had only held my
tongue that unfortunate minute! What possessed me to say that?"
Strong passion--strong pride--both long unbroken; and Ellen had yet to
learn that many a prayer and many a tear, much watchfulness, much help
from on high, must be hers before she could be thoroughly dispossessed
of these evil spirits. But she knew her sickness; she had applied to the
Physician; she was in a fair way to be well.
One thought in her solitary room that day drew streams of tears down
Ellen's cheeks. "My letter--my letter! what shall I do to get you!" she
said to herself. "It serves me right; I oughtn't to have got in a
passion; oh, I have got a lesson this time."
CHAPTER XVIII
Tranquilitie
So purely sate there, that waves great nor small
Did ever rise to any height at all.
--CHAPMAN.
The Sunday with Alice met all Ellen's hopes. She wrote a very long
letter to her mother, giving the full history of the day. How pleasantly
they had ridden to church on the pretty grey pony, she half the way, and
Alice the other half, talking to each other all the while; for Mr.
Humphreys had ridden on before. How lovely the road was, "winding about
round the mountain, up and down," and with such a wide, fair view, and
"part of the time close along by the edge of the water." This had been
Ellen's first ride on horseback. Then the letter described the little
Carra-carra church, Mr. Humphreys' excellent sermon, "every word of
which she could understand;" Alice's Sunday School, in which she was
sole teacher, and how Ellen had four little ones put under _her_ care;
and told how while Mr. Humphreys went on to hold a second service at a
village some six miles off, his daughter ministered to two infirm old
women at Carra-carra, reading and explaining the Bible to the one, and
to the other, who was blind, repeating the whole substance of her
father's sermon. "Miss Alice told me that nobody could enjoy a sermon
better than that old woman, but she cannot go out, and every Sunday Miss
Alice goes and preaches to her, she says." How Ellen went home in the
boat with Thomas and Margery, and spent the rest of the day and night
also at the parsonage; and how polite and kind Mr. Humphreys had been.
"He's a very grave-looking man indeed," said the letter, "and not a bit
like Miss Alice; he is a great deal older than I expected."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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