On board the same steamer with Mr. and Mrs. Blake and Edith was a little girl, an invalid, who interested the young English girl extremely. Edith had brought her bird with her. It was the only thing she had to remind her of happier days, and she could not bear to part with it. At little Ellen's earnest request, she hung the cage in her state-room, and, before the end of the voyage, the little sick girl had become so attached to the pretty bird, whose sweet song was almost the only cheering sound she heard during the long and weary days at sea, that she could not speak of parting with it without showing by her tearful eyes the pain it gave her. Edith felt that she ought not to deprive the little sufferer of so great a pleasure, and, concealing her reluctance to give up a souvenir she had cherished so long, she told little Ellen that the bird was to be hers. The child's evident delight was some compensation to Edith for her self-denial, yet it was with a sharp pang that she watched the cage as it was put in the carriage, after the arrival of the steamer at New York, to be conveyed to the upper part of the city, while Edith, with her new friends, went on board another steamer about to sail for Charleston.
Mr. Blake's residence was among the pine forests of the State; a region healthful, it is true, but peculiarly desolate, especially to one accustomed to the soft verdure and smiling landscape of England. The tall dark trees; unceasingly sighing forth their low and mournful murmurs, seemed to Edith a fit emblem of the griefs that were henceforward to darken her life.
There was but little in her new home to call her thoughts from the sad recollections to which they were constantly recurring. Mr. Blake and his wife were very kind to her, treating her rather as a guest than one to whose services they were entitled; but they lived in a part of the country very thinly settled, their nearest neighbor being at a distance of seven or eight miles, and there was a wearying monotony in Edith's daily life that weighed upon her spirits. Gratitude for the unvarying and thoughtful kindness shown to her by Mrs. Blake induced Edith to make every exertion to regain her accustomed cheerfulness, and she had, in some measure, succeeded, when the Christmas holidays came to remind her, by the contrast between her own position and that of the persons by whom she was surrounded, more painfully of her isolation. The little family gatherings, from which she could hardly absent herself without appearing unmindful of Mrs. Blake's gentle yet urgent requests, and yet where she felt herself among them, but not of them, recalled to her so forcibly the former seasons, when her happiness and pleasure were to all around her the one thing of the greatest importance, that, for the first time since her departure from England, Edith yielded to her feelings of loneliness, and every night wet her pillow with her tears. The reply of the Shunamite woman to the prophet's inquiry about her wants, "I dwell among mine own people," came with a new and touching significance to her mind, now that she began to feel that never again would she feel the sweet security and protection implied in such a position.