Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Jaa’s i80bdutt and its Chapter I. AM going to pay a visit to a lady who is very ill, Isa, and may perhaps be absent for some hours; be a ‘ good little girl whilst I am away, and do as nurse tells you. And be sure, added Mrs. Percy, looking back anxiously,
be sure not to go into the damp churchyard; play in the garden till Jane can take you for a walk.
Tes, mamma, said Isa readily. She was very thoughtless, but not usually self-willed; generally disposed to comply with her mamma’s wishes, but very frequently forgetful of what those wishes were. The garden in which she was playing was extremely pretty?full of gay flower-beds, and shaded by fine large trees, which had been planted many years before little Isabella had come into the world. And the house, too, looked quite as green and blooming as anything else in thegarden. It was Briston Rectory; not the Brixton near London, but a quiet little village far away from the bustle and noise of the world’s metropolis?a rural spot, where the lowliest cottage looks bright with the evergreen ivy and the snowy-blossomed myrtle. The rectory itself was anything but a cottage; yet not a brick was visible to the passer-by, who could not but notice the various shades of green from myrtle, ivy, Virginia creeper, and other climbing plants, which clothed both side and front of the building, even to the porch, making it look more like a triumphal arch of evergreens, than a substantial, pillared portico. It was as pretty a home as any little girl could wish for, but it was not Isa’s home. That was far away, in a bleak, dreary district in the north of England, where her father, who was a clergyman, held a living; but his little girl had been very ill, and the physicians thought her too delicate to live through the autumn and winter a…
