of Paris all the morning.  George painted beautifully in water-colors, and taught her to sketch from Nature, which she often did now, in their rides, when the days were pleasant enough.  George not only thrummed a Spanish guitar, but liked singing; so music went on with wonderful force and improvement.  Nothing that George liked better than botany, metaphysics, and micrology.  And now Lulu was screaming at dreadful dragons’ heads on a pin’s point, or delighted with diamond-beetles and spiders’ eyes.  She fairly revelled in the new worlds that were opened to her eager eye and hungry mind.  No more long, tiresome mornings now.  Every hour was occupied.  Intelligent smiles dimpled her beautiful mouth; the weary, unoccupied, childish look vanished from her eyes; and her talk was animated and animating.  For though she might not tell much that was new, she told it in a new way and with the fresh light of recent experience.  Thus she became in a wonderfully short time a quite different woman from the Lulu of the early winter.

We acknowledged that she was become an agreeable companion.  In a few weeks of home-education her soul had expanded to a tropical and rich growth.  This we were talking over one night, when Lulu had been with us, and when George had come for her and extinguished us with his great hearty laugh and abundant health and activity, as the sun’s effulgence does a house-candle.

“I don’t like that Remington, either,” said the minister, after we were left in this state of darkness.

“But, surely, he has given Lulu’s mind a most desirable impulse and direction.  How glad Mr. Lewis will be to see her so happy, so animated, and so sensible, when he comes home!”

“If that makes him happy, he could have had it before, I suppose.  But do you notice anything unhealthy in this mental cultivation,—­anything forced in this luxuriant flowering?  Now the light of heaven expands the whole nature, I hold, into healthy and proportioned beauty.  If anything is lacking or exuberant, the influence is not heavenly, be sure.  What do you think of this statement?”

“Very sensible, but very Hebrew to me.”

“I never thought Lulu’s were ’household eyes,’—­but now she never speaks of husband or children, of house or home.  Now that is not a suitable mental condition.  Let us hope that this intellectual effervescence will subside, and leave her some thoughtfulness and care for others, and the meditation which will make her accomplishments something to enrich and strengthen, rather than excite and overrun her mind.”

“Ah! well, it is only a few weeks, not more than six, since she found out she had a soul.  No wonder she feels she has been such a laggard in the race, she must keep on the gallop now to make up for lost time.”

“But,—­about the husband and children?”

“Oh, they will come in in due time and take their true place.  She is a young artist, and hasn’t got her perspectives arranged.  Be sure they will be in the foreground presently,” said I, cheerfully.