scape to strengthen and calm her
mind, and then walked with a firm step to the chamber-door. It was not
locked this time, but closed ajar. The child looked in a little way
only. There stood the well-remembered furniture, the room seemed the
same, only pervaded with an atmosphere of silent, solemn repose. There
would surely be no terror there.

Olive stole in, hearing in the stillness every beating of her heart.
She stood by the bed. It was covered, not with its usual counterpane of
patchwork stars, the work of Elspie's diligent hand through many a
long year, and on which her own baby-fingers had been first taught to
sew--but with a large white sheet. She stood, scarce knowing whether to
fly or not, until she heard a footstep on the stairs. One minute, and
it would be too late. With a resolute hand she lifted the sheet, and saw
the white fixed countenance, not of sleep, but death.

Uttering a shriek so wild and piercing that it rang through the house,
Olive sprang to the door, fled through the passage, at the end of which
she sank in convulsions.

That night the child was taken ill, and never recovered until some weeks
after, when the grass was already springing on poor Elspie's grave.

It is nature's blessed ordinance, that in the mind of childhood the
remembrance of fear or sorrow fades so fast. Therefore, when Olive
regained strength, and saw the house now smiling within and without
amidst the beauty of early autumn,--the horrors of death passed from her
mind, or were softened into a tender memory. Perhaps, in the end, it was
well for her that she had looked on that poor dead face, to be certain
that it was not Elspie. She never thought of Elspie in that awful
chamber any more. She thought of her as in life, standing knitting by
the nursery-window, walking slowly and sedately along the green lanes,
carrying the basket of flowers and roots, collected in their rambles, or
sitting in calm Sunday afternoons with her Bible on her knee.

And then, passing from the memory of Elspie once on earth, Olive thought
of Elspie now in heaven. Her glowing imagination idealised all sorrow
into poesy. She never watched the sunset, she never looked up into the
starry sky at night, without picturing Elspie as there. All the foibles
and peculiarities of her poor old Scottish nurse became transmuted into
the image of a guardian invisible, incorporeal; which seemed to draw
her own spirit nearer to heaven, with the thought that there was