often do with advantage.

"Aweel! He kens best. He made the warld and a' that's in't; and maybe
He will gie unto this puir wee thing a meek spirit to bear ill-luck. Ane
must wark, anither suffer. As the minister says, It'll a' come richt at
last."

Still the babe slept on, the sun sank, and night fell upon the earth.
And so the morning and evening made the first day of the new existence,
which was about to be developed, through all the various phases which
compose that strange and touching mystery--a woman's life.

CHAPTER II.

There is not a more hackneyed subject for poetic enthusiasm than
that sight--perhaps the loveliest in nature--a young mother with her
first-born child. And perhaps because it is so lovely, and is ever
renewed in its beauty, the world never tires of dwelling thereupon.

Any poet, painter, or sculptor, would certainly have raved about Mrs.
Rothesay, had he seen her in the days of convalescence, sitting at the
window with her baby on her knee. She furnished that rare sight--and
one that is becoming rarer as the world grows older--an exquisitely
beautiful woman. Would there were more of such!--that the idea of
physical beauty might pass into the heart through the eyes, and bring
with it the ideal of the soul's perfection, which our senses can
only thus receive. So great is this influence--so unconsciously do we
associate the type of spiritual with material beauty, that perhaps the
world might have been purer and better if its onward progress in what
it calls civilisation had not so nearly destroyed the fair mould of
symmetry and loveliness which tradition celebrates.

It would have done any one's heart good only to look at Sybilla
Rothesay. She was a creature to watch from a distance, and then to go
away and dream of, wondering whether she were a woman or a spirit. As
for describing her, it is almost impossible--but let us try.

She was very small in stature and proportions--quite a little fairy. Her
cheek had the soft peachy hue of girlhood; nay, of very childhood. You
would never have thought her a mother. She lay back, half-buried in the
great armchair; and then, suddenly springing up from amidst the cloud of
white muslins and laces that enveloped her, she showed her young, blithe
face.

"I will not have that cap, Elspie; I am not an invalid now, and I don't
choose to be an old matron yet," she said, in a pretty, wilful way,
as she threw off the ugly ponderous production of her nurs