those who sometimes came to listen to little Lib's allegories was Mary Ann Sherman, a tall, dark, gloomy woman of whom I had heard much. She was the daughter of old Deacon Sherman, a native of the village, who had, some years before I came to Greenhills, died by his own hand, after suffering many years from a sort of religious melancholia. Whether the trouble was hereditary and his daughter was born with a tendency inherited from her father, or whether she was influenced by what she had heard of his life, and death, I do not know. But she was a dreary creature with never a smile or a hopeful look upon her dark face. Nothing to her was right or good; this world was a desert, her friends had all left her, strangers looked coldly upon her. As for the future, there was nothing to look forward to in this world or the next. As Dave Moony, the village cynic, said, "Mary Ann wa' n't proud or set up about nothin' but bein' the darter of a man that had c'mitted the onpar'nable sin." Poor woman! her eyes were blinded to all the beauty and brightness of this world, to the hope and love and joy of the next. What wonder that one day, as she paused in passing the little group gathered around Lib, and the child began the little story I give below, I thought it well fitted to the gloomy woman's case!