The Old Stanfield House by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

CALISTA had not been religiously brought up. True, she attended church once every Sunday with Miss Druett, sitting in the family pew in the old brick church in Cohansey. At home the subject was never even mentioned. Miss Priscilla never went to church, never read the Bible or had family prayers, or asked a blessing at table, or acknowledged God in any of her ways.

Calista had found a ragged old Bible among some waste papers in the garret, and sometimes read it for the stories when she was tired of "Evelina" and the few odd volumes of "Camilla" and "Sir Charles Grandison" of which she had become possessed in the same way. These readings, the Sunday services, the prayers in school, and some faint remembrance of Miss Malvina's teaching, kept the girl from utter heathenism. Of personal religion, of any obligation on her own part to a God or a Saviour, it is hardly an exaggeration to say Calista had no more notion than her old white pony.