attention; or as a reason for refusing a service to a friend; or for declining to aid in some project for the general advantage; or for joining in some harmless amusement; or for allowing herself what she styles "indulgence work"—work for the gratification of taste, belonging rather to the school of fancy than of use. Yet Mabel achieves more than anybody else in her home circle. She plans more, begins more; plenty of us plan and begin, but most of us linger on that threshold, while she finishes, and passes quietly on to new tasks.
Mabel seldom talks of what she means to do, or what she has done. She does not flauntingly thrust her superior industry in the faces of her associates, who, if not positively indolent, yet lack her wonderful faculty of accomplishing. She does not, in the faintest degree, resemble those excitably energetic individuals who are always crying out to their neighbors, (if not in words, quite as audibly by their deeds,) "How idle and useless you are, and how busy and valuable I am! Why do you not take pattern of me?"
Indeed, Mabel would be quite startled if any one suggested, in her presence, that she was a model for others. She is wholly unconscious that her delicate feet are making "footprints in the sands of time," into which other feet may profitably tread.
Occupation does not seem to weary her any
