he farm is
ill, and she says that music all day is enough for her, and I must come
here, or I should get no chance of playing at all at night."

"But surely you feel an inspiration in the place, do you not?" Cornelia
persisted.

She looked at this lady as if she had got a hard word given her to crack,
and muttered: "I feel it quite warm here. And I do begin to love the
place."

The stately Cornelia fell back a step.

The moon was now a silver ball on the edge of the circle of grey blue
above the ring of firs, and by the light falling on the strange little
person, as she stood out of the shadow to muffle up her harp, it could be
seen that she was simply clad, and that her bonnet was not of the newest
fashion. The sisters remarked a boot-lace hanging loose. The peculiar
black lustre of her hair, and thickness of her long black eyebrows,
struck them likewise. Her harp being now comfortably mantled, Cornet
Wilfrid Pole, who had been watching her and balancing repeatedly on his
forward foot, made a stride, and "really could not allow her to carry it
herself," and begged her permission that he might assist her. "It's very
heavy, you know," he added.

"Too heavy for me," she said, favouring him with a thankful smile. "I
have some one who does that. Where is Jim?"

She called for Jim, and from the back of the sandy hillock, where he had
been reclining, a broad-shouldered rustic came lurching round to them.

"Now, take my harp, if you please, and be as careful as possible of
branches, and don't stumble." She uttered this as if she were giving Jim
his evening lesson: and then with a sudden cry she laughed out: "Oh! but
I haven't played you your tune, and you must have your tune!"

Forthwith she stript the harp half bare, and throwing a propitiatory
bright glance at her audience on the other side of her, she commenced
thrumming a kind of Giles Scroggins, native British, beer-begotten air,
while Jim smeared his mouth and grinned, as one who sees his love dragged
into public view, and is not the man to be ashamed of her, though he
hopes you will hardly put him to the trial.

"This is his favourite tune, that he taught me," she emphasized to the
company. "I play to him every night, for a finish; and then he takes care
not to knock my poor harp to pieces and tumble about."

The gentlemen were amused by the Giles Scroggins air, which she had
delivered with a sufficient sense of its lumping fun and leg-for-leg
jollity, and t