Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/21

their souls, and a burning desire to bring them to Christ; but he wounded their self love, and they offended his instincts, at every step; the consequence was, that he found himself at a middle age with an invalid wife and six children, a disappointed, unsuccessful man. Margaret was the eldest daughter, and for the first fourteen years of her life, her father's constant companion. The only unalloyed pleasure he had was in the careful training of her mind. Margaret Warren was, at sixteen, a rare girl; she was far better fitted than most boys are, to enter college. But all this learning did not in the least unfit her for practical duties. She was her mother's stay as well as her father s delight; she understood housekeeping as well as she did Greek, and found as true a pleasure in contriving how to make a garment out of slender material, as in demonstrating a problem in Euclid. Until her seventeenth year she had been unflaggingly brave, hopeful, content, in this hard life. But as she saw the years slowly making all the burdens heavier her mother growing feebler, the family growing larger, she began to ask herself what the end would be; and she found no answer to the question. A vague feeling, that she herself ought to find some way of making her mother and her five little brothers and sisters more comfortable, haunted her thoughts by night and day. She saw the secret of her father's failure more clearly than the most discontented of his parishioners ever saw it. She