ence. She could not endure disappointment in any shape. If a party of pleasure happened to be broken up by the rain, she conducted herself as though she were convinced the weather had been ordered expressly for her annoyance, and fretted all day at the unsuitableness of the atmospheric decree. If she chanced to be engaged upon a piece of sewing, embroidery, or knitting, that pleased her, and her thread got knotted, or she took a wrong stitch, or was forced to rip out, or she dropped her knitting needles, she grew vexed and pouted, and felt persecuted by some invisible agency, and was miserable for hours. Even at her toilette, when she was contemplating with only too much complacency, her fair visage in the mirror, if the glossy hair she was braiding, became tangled, or if she found an unlucky rent in some of her garments, or a disfiguring spot upon her dress, all her sunshine was gone; ill humor took possession of her; she was too much out of sorts to partake of the anticipated enjoyment, and unresistingly yielded herself up to the blue devils, who always seemed lying in wait to entrap her.
Little Viola was regarded, by casual observers, as a far more ordinary child than her brother or sister. She was intelligent, but by no means precocious. She acquired by industry and perseverance, not by intuition. In the place of striking beauty, she possessed, in an eminent degree, the loveliness of innocence and placid content, of glow-
