do to her, and I saw she was puzzled whether she ought to shake hands or not. Then Fanny went away to take her things off, but Amelia sat down, and pulled off her scarf, and laid it beside her on the sofa, not neatly folded, but all huddled up in a heap, and there it might have stayed till next week if my Aunt Kezia (who hates Amelia’s untidy ways) had not said to her,—

“My dear, had you not better take your things up-stairs?”

Amelia rose with the air of a martyr, threw the scarf on her arm, and carrying her bonnet by one string, went slowly up-stairs. When they came down together, my Aunt Kezia said to Fanny,—

“My dear, you had better take a shorter walk another time.”

“We have not had a long one, Aunt,” said Fanny, looking surprised. “We only went up by the Scar, and back by Ellen Water.”

“I thought you had been much farther than that,” says my Aunt Kezia, in her dry way. “Poor Emily (Note 1.) seemed so tired she could not get up-stairs.”

Fanny stared, and Amelia gave a faint laugh. My Aunt Kezia said no more, but went on running tucks: and Amelia joined in the conversation between Cecilia and Mr Parmenter. I hardly listened, for I was trying the new knitting stitch which Flora taught me, and it is rather a difficult one, so that it took all my mind: but all at once I heard Amelia say,—

“The beauty of self-sacrifice!”

My Aunt Kezia lapped up the petticoat in which she was running the tucks, laid it on her knee, folded her hands on it, and looked full at Amelia.

“Will you please, Miss Emily Bracewell, to tell me what you mean?”

“Mean, Aunt?”

“Yes, my dear, mean.”

“How can the spirit of that sweet poetical creature,” murmured Fanny, behind me, “be made plain to such a mere thing of fact as my Aunt Kezia?”

“Well,” said Amelia, in a rather puzzled tone, “I mean—I mean—the beauty of self-sacrifice. I do not see how else to put it.”

“And what makes it beautiful, think you?” said my Aunt Kezia.

“It is beautiful in itself,” said Amelia. “It is the fairest thing in the moral world. We see it in all the analogies of creation.”

“My dear Emily,” said my Aunt Kezia, “you may have learned Latin and Greek, but I have not. I will trouble you to speak plain, if you please. I am a plain English woman, who knows more about making shirts and salting butter than about moral worlds and the analogies of creation. Please to explain yourself—if you understand what you are talking about. If you don’t, of course I wouldn’t wish it.”

“Well, a comparison, then,” answered Amelia, in a slightly peevish tone.

“That will do,” said my Aunt Kezia. “I know what a comparison is. Well, let us hear it.”

“Do we not see,” continued Amelia, with kindling eyes, “the beauty of self-sacrifice in all things? In the patriot daring death for his country, in the mother careless of herself, that she may save her child, in the physician braving all risks at the bedside of his patient? Nay, even in the lower world, when we mark how the insect dies in laying her eggs, and see the fresh flowers of the spring arise from the ashes of the withered blossoms of autumn, can we doubt the loveliness of self-sacrifice?”

“How beautiful!” murmured Fanny. “Do listen, Cary.”

“I am listening,” I said.

“Charming, Madam!” said Mr Parmenter, stroking his mustachio. “Undoubtedly, all these are lessons to those who have eyes to see.”

I did not quite like the glance which was shot at him just then out of Cecilia’s eyes, nor the look in his which replied. It appeared to me as if those two were only making game of Amelia, and that they understood each other. But almost before I had well seen it, Cecilia’s eyes were dropped, and she looked as demure as possible.

“Some folk’s eyes don’t see things that are there,” saith my Aunt Kezia, “and some folk’s eyes are apt to see things that aren’t. My Bible tells me that God hath made everything beautiful in its season. Not out of its season, you see. Your beautiful self-sacrifice is a means to an end, not the end itself. And if you make the means into the end, you waste your strength and turn your action into nonsense. Take the comparisons Amelia has given us. Your patriot risks death in order to obtain some good for his country; the mother, that she may save the child; the physician, that he may cure his patient. What would be the good of all these sacrifices if nothing were to be got by them? My dears, do let me beg of you not to be caught by claptrap. There’s a deal of it in the world just now. And silly stuff it is, I assure you. Self-sacrifice is as beautiful as you please when it is a man’s duty, and as a means of good; but self-sacrifice for its own sake, and without an object, is not beautiful, but just ridiculous nonsense.”

“Then would you say, Aunt Kezia,” asked Amelia, “that all those grand acts of mortification of the early Christians, or of the old monks, were worthless and ridiculous? They were not designed to attain any object, but just for discipline and obedience.”

“As for the early Christians, poor souls! they had mortifications enough from the heathen around them, without giving themselves trouble to make troubles,” said my Aunt Kezia. “And the old monks, poor misguided dirty things! I hope you don’t admire them. But what do you mean by saying they were not means to an end, but only discipline? If that were so, discipline was the end of them. But, my dear, discipline is a sharp-edged tool which men do well to let alone, except for children. We are prone to make sad blunders when we discipline ourselves. That tool is safer in God’s hands than in ours.”

“But there is so much poetry in mortification!” sighed Amelia.

“I am glad if you can see it,” said my Aunt Kezia. “I can’t. Poetry in cabbage-stalks, eaten with all the mud on, and ditch water scooped up in a dirty pannikin! There would be a deal more poetry in needles and thread, and soap and water. Making verses is all very well in its place; but you try to make a pudding of poetry, and you’ll come badly off for dinner.”

“Dinner!” said Amelia, contemptuously.

“Yes, my dear, dinner. You dine once a day, I believe.”

“Dear, I never care what I eat,” cried Amelia. “The care of the body is entirely beneath those who have learned to prize the superlative value of the mind.”

My Aunt Kezia laughed. “My dear,” said she, “if you were a little older I might reason with you. But you are just at that age when girls take up with every silly notion they come across, and carry it ever so much farther, and just make regular geese of themselves. ’Tis a comfort to hope you will grow out of it. Ten years hence, if we are both alive, I shall find you making pies and cutting out bodices like other sensible women. At least I hope so.”

“Never!” cried Amelia. “I never could demean myself to be just an every-day creature like that!”

“I am sorry for your husband,” said my Aunt Kezia, bluntly, “and still more for yourself. If you set up to be an uncommon woman, the chances are that instead of rising above the common, you will just sink below it, into one of those silly things that spend their time sipping tea and flirting fans, and making men think all women foolish and unstable. And if you do that—well, all I have to say is, may God forgive you!—Cary, I want some jumballs for tea. Just go and see to them.”

So away I went to the kitchen, and heard no more of the talk. But what was I to do? I knew how to eat jumballs very well indeed, but how to make them I knew no more than Mr Parmenter’s eyeglass. She forgets, does my Aunt Kezia, that I have lived all my life in Carlisle, where Grandmamma would as soon have thought of my building a house as making jumballs.

“Maria,” said I, “my Aunt Kezia has sent me to make jumballs, and I don’t know