unusual to my isolation; and very strange too, was the strong, half-maternal love in the young mind, which felt responsibility and trust so much more strongly in regard to this child, than I had done in regard to her. I ceased to speculate on the baby looks of my niece, Elizabeth; ceased to think of her in her long streaming robes, with a smile, or to remember with a sigh how her little form was wrapped in her mother's shawl, on her mother's dreary journeys. It became me to rouse myself from my habitual dulness and inaction; it became me to rise up from my indolent, reclining frame of spirit, to uncover my head in becoming honour to the woman, while I gave the young ingenuous heart appealing to me the kindest counsel in my power. I will not deny that an undercurrent of perturbation, half pleasurable, half annoying, suggested to me the singular change which this little parlour, into which my individual person fitted snugly enough,

like an instrument into its case, must undergo, if it became even a temporary sitting-room for a refined young woman and a delicate child; nor that it was a question with me, put half consciously, but left unanswered, how I myself, with all my formal and stiffening habits, would appear under the change. My first step, however, taken in the evening of the same day, was to write to my niece at and without hesitation, such a letter as would content herself, I thought, and might sway her little brother's friends. This little brother, I confess, I felt rather uncer

tain about-not very clear in my own mind that I should feel sufficiently prepossessed, to satisfy Elizabeth, in favour of Mr. Lewis Methven's son. Jamie too-the name which should have been a claim upon my kindness, jarred upon my delicacy-the son of Sibby's second husband, called by my brother's name -and I felt a little haughtiness, and even disgust, as I wondered how the child came

by it, and whether it could be possible that Sibby herself Sibby, so pure of mind, and fastidious of feeling, could have committed so strange a blunder, as to call her baby thus, of her own will. My thoughts on this subject, however, had no influence on my letter. I wrote it with some fervour, for Elizabeth's sake; and proceeded afterwards to throw into a little ferment of consultation my puzzled landlady, Mrs. Formby, and my curious attendant, Mary Helen. It was no small problem, with their scant accommodation, to devise decorous means for the reception of my guests.

CHAPTER XIV.

SOME five or six days after this, I was startled in my little class-room, by a message from the outer school that a young lady was waiting there to see me.

It was June, and very near the afternoon hour of dismissal, so our pupils were proportionably restless, listless, heated and noisy. I hurried, not without some anxiety, out of the subdued hubbub of my own smaller apartment, into the aggravated dust and clamour of this. The outer school was of considerable size, a long room, supported

on slim bare pillars of iron, fitted up with a gaunt sloping gallery of unpainted wood, which filled one end and overshadowed the rest, and with benches and desks on the lower level entirely correspondent in their dingy colour and most homely simplicity of form. The gallery at the moment was crowded with a mass of fatigued children, some practising a painful attention-some rubbing their eyes with jacket-sleeves and corners of aprons, and by these means keeping up a staring wakefulness, wonderful to see-the more alert playing tricks upon the drowsier -the whole in a state promising anything but edification from the last lesson, which was being administered, with many interruptions and impatient calls upon their attention, by a teacher as much worn out as they.

The evening sun streamed in from the windows at the other end-streamed in dustily, throwing itself aslant on the black