Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.

The doctor who had attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to "raise" her,--"delicate child,"-- hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.
A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not belong.

What with foreboding looks and dreary death-bed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live through it.

It saddened her early years, of course,--it distressed her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its downward path.
The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious students of science.
Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother of his child.

The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,--a quality which is inestimable in a tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.
-- Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary descent of qualities.