VI.
FROM GRUBB TO BUTTERFLY.
The children were all nearly a year older when Mrs. Grubb one day climbed the flight of wooden steps heading to Marm Lisa’s Paradise, and met, as she did so, a procession of Mistress Mary’s neophytes who were wending their way homeward.
The spectacle of a number of persons of either sex, or of both sexes, proceeding in hue or grouped as an audience, acted on Mrs. Grubb precisely as the taste of fresh blood is supposed to act on a tiger in captivity. At such a moment she had but one impulse, and that was to address the meeting. The particular subject was not vital, since it was never the subject, but her own desire to talk, that furnished the necessary inspiration. While she was beginning, "Ladies and gentlemen," in her clear, pheasant voice, her convictions, opinions, views, prejudices, feelings, experiences, all flew from the different corners of what she was
