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 IV. MBS. OBEY. Mrs. Grey, most courteous reader! She comes between us and the sunshine with presence as genial. May her beneficent shadow amplify, for there is warmth in it. The capacious heart in Mrs. Grey's capacious bosom throbbed with the kindliest impulses of feminine humanity, sending a warm tide of love, and sympathy, circling with the healthy life blood through her system. The good soul was ever chanting an anthem, and its burden was (although she knew it not), " Good will toward men !" Ay, and birds, and beasts, and fishes—in short, toward every created thing wherein cir- cula.ted the blood or sap of life. Loving all animated nature with her large honest heart, Mrs. Grey especially enjoyed companionship with the same. At an earlier period her social qualities had been fostered among men—good-natured, blustering, loquacious -fellows, with lively gossiping wives; she was a ready gossip herself then, andmight be yet, if she could find a listener. Very dreary had seemed the Eyrie to the good woman, when first she led captive her social instincts to its appalling solitudes. But the principle of life is omnipresent. Men immured in dungeons are not (thank God!) alone ! A loathsome spider in the cell of the unfortunate, may act an angel's part in awakening his dormant sympathies. Touching friendships have subsisted between mice and men through years of prison companionship. The germination of a stray seed in the crevice of his prison pavement has given the yearning heart of the captive an object of interest, sympathy, and delight. Man cannot shut his brother out from the all pervading life of nature. / In like manner, the social tendencies of Mrs. Grey sent forth instinctive tendrils amid .the abounding Eyrie life. They grasped at pigs and chickens; they re... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.