persecutions of the Waldenses and stories of the Covenanting struggles.  These Elsie read and pondered with intense interest, interweaving the scenes in her imagination with the familiar places and people round her, and living a far-away dreamy life of her own in the forester’s cozy little nest, while her active-minded, busy-fingered mother made her cheese and butter, and reared her poultry, and was withal so very capable of performing her own duties, that the forester sometimes ventured to think, when Mrs. Gray complained of Elsie’s “handlessness,” that seeing the mistress was so well able for “her own turn,” it was fortunate his little daughter chanced to be of a more contemplative disposition.

Mrs. Gray had heard from Margery of the Sunday class which her young mistress had opened at Kirklands, and though, as the forester’s wife remarked, “Elsie had enough and to spare of schoolin’ already,” yet it would only be a suitable mark of respect to the lady of Kirklands to send her there on Sunday afternoons; and so it happened that Elsie became one of Grace’s scholars, sitting in the little still-room on Sunday afternoons, her large tender eyes answering in sympathetic flashes as the young teacher talked with the little company of those wonderful days when the Son o Man lived upon the earth, or told them some story of the earlier times of the world, when God’s voice was heard in the beautiful garden in the cool of the day, or when he guided his chosen people by signs and wonders.

In those days, however, the gospel tidings were not more to Elsie than many another pathetic story which she knew, and served simply as food for her imagination, though Grace’s earnest words did throw a halo round the familiar incidents which the daily reading of a chapter in the New Testament had failed to do.  Yet it was not till some of the sharp sorrows of life had fallen upon Elsie that those words which she heard in the still-room came with living power to her heart, and became to her a light in dark days, a joy in sorrowful times, which nothing was able to take away from her.

And this was the little girl who used to knock gently at the door of Granny Baxter’s cottage every morning as she passed along the road to school, arrayed in her pretty grey stuff frock, and with her snowy linen tippet and sun-bonnet.  Sometimes she found little Jean’s round smiling face peering against the peat-stack at the end of the cottage awaiting her coming, for a great friendship had sprung up between these two, though they were certainly very different in character.  Elsie seemed to have a brooding protective care over the little unkempt Jean, exercising a sort of guardianship of her in the new life at school.  She would often come to her rescue when Jean sat pouting over a blurred slate, en which she was helplessly trying to reproduce the figures on the blackboard, or give her timely aid amid the involvements of some question in the Shorter Catechism.  It was Elsie who tied the bonnet-strings now, with more dexterous fingers than Geordie’s, and performed many similar kindly offices besides; and little Jean was already learning from the forester’s daughter many habits of tidiness which her poor, failing grandmother had not been capable of teaching her.