Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in. AUNT HENDERSON. " I never met a manner more entirely without frill." J5YDNEY Smith. Late into the morning of the New Year Faith slept. Through her half consciousness crept, at last, a feeling of music that had been wandering in faint echoes among the chambers of her brain all those hours of her suspended life, and were the first sensations to stir there when that mysterious life flashed back along its channels, and brought a light more subtle than the mere sunshine that through the easterly windows was flooding all her room with its silent arousal. Light, and music, and a sense of an unexamined, half-remembered joy, filled her being and embraced her at her waking on this New Year's Day. A moment she lay in a passive, unthinking delight; and then her first full and distinct thought shaped itself, as from a sweet and solemn memory, — " Rouse to some high and holy work of love, And thou an angel's happiness shalt know." An impulse of lofty feeling held her in its ecstasy; a noble longing and determination shaped itself, though vaguely, within her. For a little, she was touched in her deepest and truest nature; she was uplifted to the threshold of a great resolve. But generalities are so grand, — details so commonplace and unsatisfying. What should she do? What "high and holy work " lay waiting for her? And, breaking in upon her reverie, —bringing herdown with its rough and common call to common duty, — the second bell for breakfast rang. "Oh, dear! It is no use! Who'll know what great things I 've been wishing and planning, when I 've nothing to show for it but just being late to breakfast? And father hates it so, —and New Year's morning, too! " Hurrying her toilet, she repaired, with all the haste possible, to the breakfast-room, where her ...