All this, however, was neither here nor there, so far as the fixed
intention of my parents was concerned to dispose of me for an
indefinite period of time, and within three weeks of that day when the
announcement was first made to me, I was crying myself to sleep in a
narrow little bed, hundreds of miles away from my father's house.
Perhaps there was not another girl among the three hundred boarders of
Notre Dame Abbey, that had such little reason to be home-sick as Amey
Hampden; and yet--God help us! into what strange moods we are prone to
fall! When a wide-spreading distance had thrust itself between me and
the home of my early days, I could not help feeling that, after all,
my heart had tendrils like other people's, and that this separation
had torn them rudely away from the objects, few or many, worthy or
unworthy, around which they had twined with a clinging firmness.
The bare, white-washed walls of this strange dormitory brought out in
touching relief the cosy corners of my own little room at home, and
the strict and rigid discipline, to which I felt I never could
conform, made me look back with a hopeless regret upon the wandering,
aimless hours I had spent unfettered, before I became a pupil of this
bleak institution.
I did not know then, as I know now, that it is not the house which
makes the home; that white-washed walls and painted floors may melt
into artistic beauty, where glows the never smouldering fire of
Christian love; and I have searched the world in vain for many a year,
among riches and luxuries and comforts, but I have never had the
smallest glimpse of that same abiding, enduring and self-sacrificing
love which presided over me, waking or sleeping, smiling or weeping,
during my happy, yet transient sojourn, in that distant Abbey of Notre
Dame.
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