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Grammar School, then in excellent repute, as well for scholarship, as for its high moral tone.

It was a cheerful house. The best rooms had the unfortunate propensity of looking upon the street, but behind there was a sunny walled garden, famous for its fruit trees, and with a luxuriance of old-fashioned flowers bordering the more useful vegetable productions. There were broad gravel walks to pace in winter, and no lack of shady retreats for

summer.

Summer was past and gone, however, as Mrs. Lennox remarked with a sigh when the twilight fell before David's return from school. She added an admonition to Isabel not to put out her eyes by reading by firelight; but Isabel, with her arms pillowed on a folio edition of Shakspeare, and her curls falling over the page, still pored over As You Like It, and did not hear or heed. Even as she sat, she would have made a study for a painter, and she was in truth picturesque rather than beautiful, with wonderful hazel eyes, rippled brown hair, and a complexion of sun-burnt brilliancy. And in all her movements there was that graceful abandon which does not, or ought not to survive very early youth.

In colouring and features the sisters were not unlike, yet those who knew them well could only note the dissimilarity between them. Ruth was the elder by three years, a shy and demure maiden, who had attained that most shy and demure age of 'sweet sixteen.' Her hair was not permitted to escape in wavy tendrils, but smoothly braided round her face, though nature had her way so far that it was rippled still. Her eyes were less remarkable for size and brilliancy, nor were her cheeks so tanned, perhaps because she was more mindful than the younger sister of precautions against sun and weather. Her dress and air were scrupulously neat, or, as David was wont to declare, most formally precise: nominally the two sisters were dressed alike, but even in small matters character will peep out; and while Isabel's dark merino dress was set off by a dainty bow of cherry-coloured ribbon, which was not always perfectly straight, that of Ruth was only relieved by the linen collar and cuffs, sitting without a crease round her slender throat, and singularly small hands. "There is David,' said Mrs. Lennox, as a scuffle of feet upon the pavement was followed by such a vigorous opening and shutting

STILL WATERS

BY THE AUTHOR OF 'DOROTHY'

'Their strength is to sit still.'

Behold! we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last-far off-at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

In Memoriam.

DER HISPERH

AD HRDUA

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.

LONDON

JOHN W. PARKER AND SON WEST STRAND

1857

[The Author reserves the right of Translation]

249. 6.337.

LONDON:

SAVILL AND EDWARDS, PRINTERS,

CHANDOS STREET.

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