claps his hands; but, oh, the poor little fellow is so affectionate! When I come home he shouts as if he would go mad with pleasure."
Lucy had now been four months at the Hartell's, and she was beginning to suffer the natural consequences of her position. Her principles rested too firmly on a sure basis to be shaken, and her dispositions were too sweet, they had too much natural force, to be easily impaired; but her habits, like the habits of most young people, were flexible, and at the mercy of circumstances. She fared sumptuously every day, and in her steril and inactive life her meals became events. She had felt a blush steal into her cheek as she detected herself mentally wondering how she had existed day after day on rye-mush. Trained from infancy to early rising, it had seemed as natural to her as to the birds to rise when the day broke. At Mrs. Hartell's she occupied a sofa-bed in the nursery. At first it had seemed to her a real misery to wait, hour after hour in the morning, till it pleased Miss Adéle to have the blinds opened; but, in the process of a few weeks, partly from keeping irregular hours at night, and partly from the facility that all young people have at sleeping, and partly, probably, from the physical indolence that seems ever ready to encroach on our energies, she became at first passive, and then, like the sluggard, she loved a little more folding of the arms to sleep, and a little more slumber.
From having been a very bee in her industry, she was falling into the lounging, desultory habits of the household. Sometimes she would be so hurried by Adéle that she was compelled to de-
