Poor Jacquelina! for, of course, you can have no doubt that it is of her we are speaking--she perpetrated her last lugubrious joke on the day that she was to have made her vows, for when asked what patron saint she would select by taking that saint's name in religion, she answered--St. Theresa, because St. Theresa would understand her case the best, having been, like herself, a scamp and a rattle-brain before she took it into her head to astonish her friends by becoming a saint. Poor Jacko said this with the solemnest face and the most serious earnestness; but, with such a reputation as she had had for pertness, of course nobody would believe but that she was making fun of the "Blessed Theresa," and so she was put upon further probation, with the injunction to say the seven penitential Psalms seven times a day, until she was in a holier frame of mind; which she did, though under protest that she didn't think the words composed by David to express his remorse for his own enormous sin exactly suited her case. Sister Theresa, if the least steady and devout, was certainly the most active and zealous and courageous among them all. She yawned horribly over the long litanies and long sermons; but if ever there was a work of mercy requiring extraordinary labor, privation, exposure and danger, Sister Theresa was the one to face, in the cause, lightning and tempest, plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder, and sudden death! Happy was she? or content? No; she was moody, hysterical and devotional by turns--sometimes a zeal for good works would possess her; sometimes the old fun and quaintness would break out, and sometimes an overwhelming fit of remorse--each depending upon the accidental cause that would chance to arouse the moods.
Humane creatures are like climates--some of a temperate atmosphere, taking even life-long sorrow serenely--never forgetting, and never exaggerating its cause--never very wretched, if never quite happy. Others of a more torrid nature have long, sunny seasons of bird-like cheerfulness and happy forgetfulness, until some slight cause, striking "the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," shall startle up memory--and grief, intensely realized, shall rise to anguish, and a storm shall pass through the soul, shaking it almost to dissolution, and the poor subject thinks, if she can think, that her heart must go to pieces this time! But the storm passes, and nature, instead of being destroyed, is refreshed and ready for the sunshine and the song-birds again. The elastic heart throws off its weight, the spirits revive, and life goes on joyously in harmony with nature.