and to treasure it up in the chambers of her mind, than to fill those chambers with heaps of knowledge. Indeed for knowledge Rachel cared comparatively little. In such as displayed more clearly the glories of God's creation she delighted; but man's learning, man's science, touched her not. To think was her delight; a silent, solitary, forbidden pleasure, in which Rachel had to indulge by stealth.

For all this time, and especially since the death of her sister, she suffered keenly from home troubles, from a little domestic persecution, painful, pertinacious, and irritating. Mrs. Gray vaguely felt that her daughter was not like other girls, and not knowing that she was in reality very far beyond most; feeling, too, that Rachel was wholly unlike herself, and jealously resenting the fact, she teased her unceasingly, and did her best to interrupt the fits of meditation, which she did not scruple to term "moping." When her mind was most haunted with some fine thought, Rachel had to talk to her step-mother, to listen to her, and to take care not to reply at random; if she failed in any of these obligations, half-an-hour's lecture was the least penalty she could expect. Dear to her, for this reason; were the few moments of solitude she could call her own; dear to her was that little room, where she could steal away at twilight time and think in peace.

Very unlike her age was this ignorant dress-maker of the nineteenth century. Ask the men and women of the day to read volumes; why, there is not a season but they go through the Herculean labour of swallowing down histories written faster than time flies, novels by the dozen, essays, philosophic and political, books of travels, of science, of statistics, besides the nameless host of reviews, magazines, and papers, daily and weekly. Ask them to study: why, what is there they do not know, from the most futile accomplishment to the most abstruse science? Ask them too, if you like, to enter life, to view it under all its aspects; why, they have travelled over the whole earth; and life, they know from the palace down to the hovel; but bid them think! They stare aghast: it is the task of Sisyphus—the labour of the Danaide; as fast as thought enters their mind, it goes out again. Bid them commune, one day with God and their own hearts—they reply dejectedly that they cannot; for their intellect is quick and brilliant, but their heart is cold. And thought springs from the heart, and in her heart had Rachel Gray found it.

The task impossible to them was to her easy and delightful. Time wore on; deeper and more exquisite grew what Rachel quaintly termed to herself "the pleasure of thinking." And oh! she thought sometimes, and it was a thought that made her heart bum, "Oh! that people only knew the pleasures of thinking! Oh! if people would only think!" And mom, and noon, and night, and bending over her work, or sitting at peaceful twilight time in the little back room, Rachel thought; and thus she went on through life, between those two fair sisters, Thought and Prayer.

Reader, hare you known many thinkers? We confess that we hare known many men and women of keen and great intellect, some geniuses; but only one real thinker have we known, only one who really thought for thought's own sake, and that one was Rachel Gray.

And now, if she moves through this story, thinking much and doing little, you know why.

CHAPTER IV.

It was not merely in meditation that Rachel indulged, when she sought the little room. The divine did not banish the human from her heart; and she had friends known to her, but from that back room window; but friends they were, and, in their way and degree, valued ones.

First, came the neighbour's children. By standing up on an old wooden stool in the yard, they could see Rachel at her window, and Rachel could see them. They were rude and ignorant little things enough, and no better than young heathens, in rearing and knowledge; yet they liked to hear Rachel singing hymns in a low voice; they even caught from her, scraps of verses, and sang them in their own fashion; and when Rachel, hearing this, took courage to open a conversation with them, and to teach them as well as she could, she found in them voluntary and sufficiently docile pupils. Their intercourse, indeed, was brief, and limited to a few minutes every evening that Rachel could steal up to her little room, but it was cordial and free.

Another friend had Rachel, yet one with whom she had never exchanged speech. There existed, at the back of Mrs. Gray's house, a narrow court, inhabited by the poorest of the poor. Over part of this court, Mrs. Gray's back windows commanded a prospect which few would have envied— yet it had proved to Rachel the source of the truest and the keenest pleasure.

From her window, Rachel could look clearly into a low damp cellar opposite, the abode of a little old Frenchwoman, known in the neighbourhood, as "mad Madame Rose."

Madame Rose, as she called herself, was a very diminutive old woman— unusually so, but small and neat in all her limbs, and brisk in all her movements. She was dry, too, and brown as a nut, with a restless black eye, and a voluble tongue, which she exercised mostly in her native language—not that Madame Rose could not speak English; she had resided some fifteen years in London, and could say 'yes' and 'no,' &c., quite fluently. Her attire looked peculiar, in this country, but it suited her person excellently well; it was simply that of a French peasant woman, with high peaked cap, and kerchief, both snow-white, short petticoats, and full, a wide apron, clattering wooden shoes, and blue stockings.

What wind of fortune had wafted this little French fairy to a London cellar, no one ever knew. How she lived, was almost as great a mystery. Every Sunday morning, she went forth, with a little wooden stool, and planted herself at the door of the French chapel; she asked for nothing, but took what she got. Indeed, her business there did not seem to be to get anything, but to make herself busy. She nodded to every one who went in or out, gave unasked-for information, and assisted the policeman in keeping the carriages in order. She darted in and out, among wheels and horses, with reckless audacity; and once, to the infinite wrath of a fat liveried coachman, she suspended herself—she was rather short—from the aristocratic reins he held, and boldly attempted to turn the heads of his horses. On week days, Madame Rose stayed in her cellar, and knitted. It was this part of her life which Rachel knew, and it was the most beautiful; for this little, laughed-at being, who lived upon charity, was, herself, all charity. Never yet, for five years that Rachel had watched her, had she seen Madame Rose alone in her cellar. Poor girls, who looked very much like out-casts, old and infirm women, helpless children, had successively shared the home, the bed, and the board of Madame Rose. For her seemed written the beautiful record, "I was naked, and ye clothed me; I was hungry, and ye fed me: athirst, and ye gave me drink; and I was houseless, and you sheltered me."

With humble admiration, Rachel saw a charity and a zeal which she could not imitate. Like Mary, she could sit at the feet of the Lord, and, looking up, listen, rapt and absorbed, to the divine teaching. But the spirit of Martha, the holy zeal and fervour with which she bade welcome to her heavenly guest, were not among the gifts of Rachel Gray.

Yet, the pleasure with which she stood in the corner of her own window, and looked down into the cellar of Madame Rose, was not merely that of religious sympathy or admiration. As she saw it this evening, with the tallow light that burned on the table, rendering every object minutely distinct, Rachel looked with another feeling than that of mere curiosity. She