Shirley

watercourse, each perpetually altering in aspect as the sun shone out or was overcast; as the weather was wet or fair, dark or bright. Nothing changes in Briarfield Rectory: the plaster of the parlour-ceilings, the paper on the walls, the curtains, carpets, chairs, are still the same.«
    »Is change necessary to happiness?«
    »Yes.«
    »Is it synonymous with it?«
    »I don't know; but I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.«
    Here Jessie spoke.
    »Is n't she mad?« she asked.
    »But, Rose,« pursued Caroline, »I fear a wanderer's life, for me at least, would end like that tale you are reading, – in disappointment, vanity, and vexation of spirit.«
    »Does ›the Italian‹ so end?«
    »I thought so when I read it.«
    »Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank. To do this is to commit the sin of him who buried his talent in a napkin – despicable sluggard!«
    »Rose,« observed Mrs. Yorke, »solid satisfaction is only to be realized by doing one's duty.«
    »Right, mother! And if my Master has given me ten talents, my duty is to trade with them, and make them ten talents more. Not in the dust of household drawers shall the coin be interred. I will
not
deposit it in a broken-spouted tea-pot, and shut it up in a china-closet among tea-things. I will
not
commit it to your work-table to be smothered in piles of woollen hose. I will
not
prison it in the linen-press to find shrouds among the sheets: and least of all, mother – (she got up from the floor) – least of all will I hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be ranged with bread, butter, pastry, and ham on the shelves of the larder.«
    She stopped – then went on: –
    »Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will come home some day, and will demand from all an account. The tea-pot, the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen, will yield up their barren deposit in many a house: suffer your daughters, at least, to put their money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled at the Master's coming to pay him his own with usury.«
    »Rose, did you bring your sampler with you, as I told you?«
    »Yes, mother.«
    »Sit down, and do a line of marking.«
    Rose sat down promptly, and wrought according to orders. After a busy pause of ten minutes, her mother asked –
    »Do you think yourself oppressed now? A victim?«
    »No, mother.«
    »Yet, as far as I understood your tirade, it was a protest against all womanly and domestic employment.«
    »You misunderstood it, mother. I should be sorry not to learn to sew: you do right to teach me, and to make me work.«
    »Even to the mending of your brother's stockings and the making of sheets?«
    »Yes.«
    » Where is the use of ranting and spouting about it, then?«
    »Am I to do nothing but that? I will do that, and then I will do more. Now, mother, I have said my say. I am twelve years old at present, and not till I am sixteen will I speak again about talents: for four years, I bind myself an industrious apprentice to all you can teach me.«
    »You see what my daughters are, Miss Helstone,« observed Mrs. Yorke: »how precociously wise in their own conceits! ›I would rather this – I prefer that;‹ such is Jessie's cuckoo-song: while Rose utters the bolder cry, ›I
will,
and I will
not!
‹«
    »I render a reason, mother: besides, if my cry is bold, it is only heard once in a twelvemonth. About each birthday, the spirit moves me to deliver one oracle respecting my own instruction and management: I utter it and leave it; it is for you, mother, to listen or not.«
    »I would advise all young ladies,« pursued Mrs. Yorke, »to study the characters of such children as they chance to meet with before they marry, and have any of their own; to consider well how they would like the responsibility of guiding the careless, the labour of persuading the stubborn, the constant burden and task of training the best.«
    »But with love it need not be so very difficult,« interposed Caroline. »Mothers love their children most dearly – almost better than they love themselves.«
    »Fine talk! Very sentimental! There is the rough, practical part of life yet to come for you, young Miss!«
    »But, Mrs. Yorke, if I take a little baby into my arms – any poor woman's infant for instance, – I feel that I love that helpless thing quite peculiarly, though I am not its mother. I could do almost anything for it willingly, if it were delivered over