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“Isobel,” said my aunt, folding her hands on her lap, and bending her very thick brows on the fire, “I want you to clearly understand that I speak with great hesitation, and without any authority. I can do nothing for you but tell you what I have found myself in my struggles.”

“Thank you a thousand times,” said I, “that’s what I want. You know I hear two sermons every Sunday, and I have a lot of good books. Mrs. Welment sends me a little book about ill-temper every Christmas. The last one was about saying a little hymn before you let yourself speak whenever you feel angry. Philip got hold of it, and made fun of it. He said it was like the recipe for catching a sparrow by putting salt on its tail, because if you were cool enough to say a hymn, there would then be no need for saying it. What do you think, Aunt Isobel?”

“My dear, I have long ago given up the idea that everybody’s weak points can all be strengthened by one plaster. The hymn might be very useful in some cases, though I confess that it would not be in mine. But prayer is; and I find a form of prayer necessary. At the same time I have such an irritable taste, that there are very few forms of devotion that give me much help but the Prayer-Book collects and Jeremy Taylor. I do not know if you may find it useful to hear that in this struggle I sometimes find prayers more useful, if they are not too much to the sore point. A prayer about ill-temper might tend to make me cross, when the effort to join my spirit with the temptation-tried souls of all ages in a solemn prayer for the Church Universal would lift me out of the petty sphere of personal vexations, better than going into my grievances even piously. I speak merely of myself, mind.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But about what I said about hating. Aunt Isobel, did you ever change your feelings by force? Do you suppose anybody ever did?”

“I believe it is a great mistake to trouble one’s self with the spiritual experiences of other people when one cannot fully know their circumstances, so I won’t suppose at all. As to what I am sure of, Isobel, you know I speak the truth.”

“Yes,” said I; it would have been impertinence to say more.

“I have found that if one fights for good behaviour, GOD makes one a present of the good feelings. I believe you will find it so. Even when you were a child, if you had tried to be good, and had managed to control yourself, and had not thrown the hatchet, I am quite sure you would not have hated Philip for long. Perhaps you would have thought how much better Philip used to behave before your father and mother died, and a little elder-sisterly, motherly feeling would have mixed with your wrath at seeing him with his fat legs planted apart, and his shoulders up, the very picture of wilful naughtiness. Perhaps you might have thought you had repulsed him a little harshly when he wanted to help, as you were his chief playmate and twin sister.”

“Please don’t,” said I. “How I wish I had! Indeed I don’t know how I can ever speak of hating one of the others when there are so few of us, and we are orphans. But everybody isn’t one’s brother. And–oh, Aunt Isobel, at the time one does get so wild, and hard, and twisted in one’s heart!”

“I don’t think it is possible to overrate the hardness of the first close struggle with any natural passion,” said my aunt earnestly; “but indeed the easiness of after-steps is often quite beyond one’s expectations. The free gift of grace with which GOD perfects our efforts may come in many ways, but I am convinced that it is the common experience of Christians that it does come.”