"Grandfather Gleason used to say that conversion is not the work of man, though man may be the honored instrument," said Mrs. Gleason. "Agnes has got a great deal of good from Miss Armstrong already, and I hope she may get more. It is a pity you would not try going to school to her yourself, Milly. Perhaps she might do something, even for you.'

Milly curled her lip and tossed her head; but she had come off second best in more than one encounter with her hostess, and she did not care to try another. She made up her mind, however, that, if Agnes had taken up any such notions, she would soon laugh her out of them. Mrs. Gleason had rightly called her one of the birds of the air. But such birds have no power over the seed sown in good ground; it is only that which falls on the hard-trodden wayside which becomes their prey.

CHAPTER IX.

TWO TEA-PARTIES.

WHEN Mrs. Weston and Miss Armstrong entered Mrs. Bassett's front parlor, they found the rest of the company assembled, and were welcomed by their hostess with "Why, how late you are! I was most thinking you were not coming. I'm afraid you're growing fashionable, Abby."

"Not a bit," answered Mrs. Weston. "It was not fashion that kept me, but flour. Mr. Bassett was so late with the grist, that he made me late with my Saturday's baking; and I didn't like to leave it all to Selina."

"Do tell!" said Mrs. Bassett. "Pa has been very much driven with work, and Mr. Cook being sick puts him about. But where is Selina ? But where is Selina? I thought

she would come too."

"I left her to keep house. She has to be elder daughter, now Lizzy is gone."

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'Well, she must come another time. - Do take off your things, Miss Armstrong. I'm so glad to see you! I believe you know everybody here only Patience. Where is she? Oh, here she comes.

Patience, let me make you acquainted with Miss Armstrong."

"I feel as if I knew Miss Fletcher already through the children," said Miss Armstrong, cordially shaking hands with Patience. "I hope Ednah is none the worse for her adventure this morning. Poor child, she had a terrible fright."

"Oh, yes, with the snake," said Mrs. Bassett. "The scare was enough to kill her."

"I don't think she was as much frightened as Faithie was," answered Patience. "She says herself she didn't have time. But it is dreadful to think what would have happened only for Kit," she added, shuddering. "I little thought, when I was fretting about that child's coming to school with our young ones, what she was to do for them."

"Which shows what I am always telling you, Patience, that there is no use in fretting and borrowing trouble," remarked Mrs. Bassett.

"Kit seems a well-disposed child in every way, I think," said Miss Celia, whose knitting-needles were pursuing their rapid, even rounds in the corner. "She brought home my tortoise-shell kitten when it strayed away. I can hardly think she belongs to these people."

"She don't," returned Aunt Betsy, who had fulfilled Myra's prediction by 'dropping in' a little before tea-time. "If she was a Mallory, we should know something about her, at any rate. They took her out of the poorhouse. I don't suppose anybody even knows whether she had a grandfather."

"It seems probable that she had one of some

sort," said Mrs. Bassett. "Folks don't often come into the world like mushrooms, without any ancestors at all."

"She must have come of a good family somehow," said Miss Celia with mild persistence.

"I do not think that so certain," remarked Miss Armstrong. "I have had a good deal of experience with children in all positions, from what might be called the top of the social ladder to the bottom; and I have found all sorts of dispositions in all sorts of places. I have seen most beautiful growths of goodness and self-sacrifice in the midst of vice and ignorance such as you can have no idea of unless you have seen it, and I have seen very extraordinary tendencies to wickedness among children who had been most carefully brought up.”

"Well, you won't persuade me that it don't make any difference whether folks are respectable, decent folks, or loafers," said Aunt Betsy. "Nobody will ever make me think that."

"Anybody would be very foolish to try," said Mrs. Weston. "All Miss Armstrong says is, that good and bad dispositions do not depend entirely upon family, or even upon training."

"Exactly so," assented Miss Armstrong. "Other things being equal, well-trained and well-nurtured children are likely to be better than those who are neither; but there are exceptions in all cases."

"To read some books, one would think that all people need is, to be shown the right way, and they jump into it at once," said Miss Delia. "I was reading one the other day, in which a young girl went

to stay at a country village for the summer, and converted everybody in it. Just as if all one had to do was to catch folks, and do good to them!"

"I know the class of books you mean, and I have a special objection to them," said Miss Armstrong. "Old-fashioned people complain of novels because they give false views of life, and I find fault with these books for the same reason. Enthusiastic young people reading them are apt, as you say, to think that all one has to do to reform people is to set the good before them, and they take to it at once; whereas the fact is, that sinners in general are not wicked because they know no better, but because they like wickedness the best."

"Just so," assented Mrs. Weston. "Look at the case of Harry Burchard, for instance," alluding to a somewhat famous burglar. "That fellow had a good bringing-up, and learned a good trade; and the same enterprise and ingenuity which made him such a successful burglar would have made him an equally successful business-man."

"And it was no want of grandfathers in his case," observed Miss Delia. "He is a great-grandson of old Mr. Wheeler, who used to preach in Oldbury in Revolutionary times. I've noticed in these same books, that, in all the church work, the pastor is of no account whatever it is the young folks that do every thing."

"Talking of pastors, is it true that Mr. Brace is coming in two weeks?"

"Quite true, I am glad to say," answered Mrs. Weston. "And that reminds me of something I want