Percy's holidays

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

"What did you mean by Louise sinning her mercies, Mrs. Swayne?" asked Percy, as, having dispatched Harry with her box, she came back to the kitchen door, to watch for the first whistle of the little steamer which lay in sight at the landing below.

"Oh, 't is just a by-word they have in Scotland," replied Mrs. Swayne. "When a person is well off, and yet keeps grumbling and discontented-like, and all the time wishing themselves elsewhere, people say they are sinning their mercies. Louise has just as good a place as any girl could have, and as kind a friend as ever lived in your aunt; and yet you see she thinks, if she were only somewhere else, or if things were only different—but there's the whistle. Good-by, dear, and a pleasant voyage to you!"

"I wonder," said Percy to herself, as she established herself in a snug corner on the upper deck of the steamer, and sat watching the people who were coming on board, "I wonder if I ever sin my mercies."

[CHAPTER II.]

PERSEVERANCE.

PERCY, or Perseverance, Denham was the orphan niece of Miss Zoe Devine, who lived at Bridgeport, or "The Bridge," as the place was familiarly called.

Percy's father had been an officer in the regular army. He was a man respected and honoured in the army and out of it, and was in a fair way of rising in his profession, when his career was cut short by an Apache bullet; and his young wife was left without any earthly consolations except her little girl, and the thought that at least her husband had been granted a swift and easy passage to heaven, instead of falling alive, like some of his less fortunate companions, into the hands of those amiable savages, whom, by the way, he had always befriended to the extent of his power.

Mrs. Denham was not very strong, and her life, like that of most officers' wives, had been a trying one. In fact, her husband's death-blow had been hers also; and she only lived long enough to write to her husband's half-sister,—the only near relative he had,—and beg her to take charge of his little girl. Miss Zoe Devine was, as she described herself, a stay-at-home body in general; but she was one of those people who can always do what seems necessary to be done. She received her sister-in-law's letter in the morning, and set out for the distant post, whence the letter was mailed, at six o'clock that evening. She arrived only in time to see her sister die; and in two or three weeks she was once more at home at "The Bridge" with little Percy, then eleven years old, but so small of her age, and so shy and retiring in her manners, that she might easily have passed for three years younger.

But if Percy was backward in her growth and manners, she was by no means so in her mind; and when she began to feel herself at home with Aunt Zoe, she showed such a capacity for and eagerness in learning, that Miss Devine at once decided to give her niece the best education possible. This was not done without some self-sacrifice on her part; for though "well off" as the phrase is, Miss Devine was by no means rich, and the income of Percy's own little property was not much more than enough to clothe her. Miss Devine did not altogether like the school at "The Bridge." It was too large, and was arranged and managed with so much "system," that there seemed very little chance for improvement. There was a boarding school at Round Springs, the next port on the lake, and to this school Miss Devine determined to send Percy.

When Percy found that she was to go away to boarding school, she was in despair. She had learned to love Aunt Zoe and to feel at home with her; but she was totally unused to the society of girls of her own age, and she dreaded them almost as much as the Indians who had been her daily terror, who even yet haunted her dreams. She knew that she should be perfectly miserable; and she was not at all consoled when her aunt told her that she should come home every Saturday and stay till the next Monday,—at least till the steamers were laid up for the winter.