Nature is liberal and impartial as she is faithful. The green earth offers a home for the eyes of the poorest beggar; the soft and purifying winds visit all equally; the tenderly majestic stars look down on him who rests in a bed of down, and on him whose pallet is the naked earth; and the blue sky embraces equally the child of sorrow and of joy.
The teachings of nature are open to all. The poor heart-broken mother sees, in the parent leaves that enfold the tender heart of the young plant, and in the bird that strips her own breast of its down to shelter her young from the night air, the same instinct that teaches her to cherish the child of sorrow. He who addressed the poor and illiterate drew his illustrations from nature: the lily of the field, the fowls of the air, and the young ravens, he made his teachers to those who, like him, lived in the open air, and were peculiarly susceptible to all the influences of nature.
To return from this digression. Perhaps my readers will wish to know more of poor Nanny, as she was called.
Nothing was known of her early history. She had come from the mother country four years before, with this little child, then an infant, and had taken a lodging in the poor fisherman's hut. She said the little girl was her grandchild, and all her affections were centred in her. She was entirely reserved as to her previous history, and was irritated if any curiosity was expressed about it, though she sometimes gave out hints that she had been an accomplice and victim of some deed for which she felt remorse. As she was quite harmless, and the inhabitants were much scattered, she was unmolested, and earned a scanty living by picking berries, fishing, and helping those who were not quite as poor as herself. Edith visited her often, and Mr. Grafton, though she would not acknowledge him as a spiritual guide, ministered to all her temporal wants.
CHAPTER IX.
Thou changest not, but I am changed,
Since first thy pleasant banks I ranged;
The visions of my youth are past,
Too bright, too beautiful, to last.
Bryant.
More than two years had passed since Edith's visit to the old woman of the cliff. Changes had taken place in all the personages of my little tale; but in Edith they were most apparent. She who had sung all day as the birds sing, because she could not help it, at nineteen had learned to reflect and to analyze; a sensitive conscience had taken the place of spontaneous and impulsive virtue; and the same heart that could be happy all day long in nursing a young chicken, or watching the opening of a flower, or carrying food to a poor old woman, now closed her days with thinking, and moistened her pillow with unbidden tears.