This you may be sure Emilie did not fail to teach her pupil; but a great many such lessons may be received into the head without one finding an entrance to the heart, and Edith was in the not very uncommon habit of looking on her faults in the light of misfortunes, just as any one might regard a deformed limb or a painful disorder.  She was, indeed, too much accustomed to talk of her faults, and was a great deal too easy about them.

“My dear,” Emilie would say after her confessions, “I do not believe you see how sinful these things are, or surely you would not so very, very, often commit them.”  This was the real state of the case; and it may be said of all those who are in the habit of mere confessions, that they do not believe things to be so very bad, because they do not understand how very good and holy is the God against whom they sin.  Edith had this to learn; books could not teach her this.  She who taught her all else so well, could not teach her this; it was to be learned from a higher source still.

Well, you are thinking, some of you, that this is a prosy chapter, but you must not skip it.  It is just what Emily Schomberg would have said to you, if you had been pupils of hers.  The end of reading is not, or ought not to be, mere amusement; so read a grave page now and then with attention and thoughtfulness.

CHAPTER SIXTH.

EMILIE’S TRIALS.

The truth must be told of Emilie; she was not clever with her hands, and she was, nevertheless, a little too confident in her power of execution, so willing and anxious was she to serve you.  The directions Fred gave her were far from clear; and after the paper was all cut and was to be pasted together, sorrowful to say, it would not do at all.  Fred, in spite of his late apology was very angry, and seizing the scissors said he should know better another time than to ask Miss Schomberg to do what she did not understand.  “You have wasted my paper, too,” said the boy, “and my time in waiting for what I could better have done myself.”

Emilie was very sorry, and she said so; but a balloon could not exactly be made out of her sorrow, and nothing short of a balloon would pacify Fred, that was plain.  “Must it be ready for to-morrow?” she asked.

“Yes, it must,” he said.  Three other boys were going to send up balloons.  It was the Queen’s coronation day, and he had promised to take a fourth balloon to the party; and the rehearsal of all this stirred up Fred’s ire afresh, and he looked any thing but kind at Miss Schomberg.  What was to be done?  Edith suggested driving to the next market town to buy one; but her papa wanted the pony gig, so they could only sally forth to Mrs. Cox’s for some more tissue paper, and begin the work again.  This was very provoking to Edith.

“To have spent all the morning and now to be going to spend all the afternoon over a trumpery balloon, which you can’t make after all, Miss Schomberg, is very tiresome, and I wanted to go to old Joe Murray’s to-day and see if the children have picked me up any corallines.”