hurchyard, saying, that was her
baby-brother's cradle now. Poor little Olive!--her only knowledge of the
tie of brotherhood was these few days of silent watching and the little
green mound left behind in the churchyard.

From that time there came a gradual change over the household, and
over Olive's life. No more long, quiet hours after dinner, her father
reading, her mother occupied in some light work, or resting on the sofa
in delicious idleness, while Olive herself, little noticed, but yet
treated with uniform kindness by both, sat on the hearthrug, fondling
the sleepy cat, or gazing with vague childish reverie into the fire. No
more of the proud pleasure with which, on Sunday afternoons, exalted to
her grave papa's knee, she created an intense delight out of what was to
him a somewhat formal duty, and said her letters from the large family
Bible. These childish joys vanished gradually, she scarce knew how. Her
papa she now rarely saw, he was so much from home, and the quiet house,
wherein she loved to ramble, became a house always full of visitors, her
beautiful mamma being the centre of its gaiety. Olive retreated to
her nursery and to Elspie, and the rest of her childhood was one long,
solitary, pensive dream.

In that dream was the clear transcript of all the scenes amidst which
it passed. The old hall, seated on a rising ground, and commanding views
which were really beautiful in their way, considering that Merivale
was on the verge of a manufacturing district, bounded by pastoral and
moorland country. Those strange furnace-fires, which rose up at dusk
from the earth and gleamed all around the horizon, like red fiery eyes
open all night long, how mysteriously did they haunt the imaginative
child! Then the town, Oldchurch, how in her after-life it grew distinct
from all other towns, like a place seen in a dream, so real and yet so
unreal! There was its castle-hill, a little island within a large pool,
which had once been a real fortress and moat. Old Elspie contemned
alike tradition and reality, until Olive read in her little "History of
England" the name of the place, and how John of Gaunt had built a castle
there. And then Elspie vowed it was unworthy to be named the same day
with beautiful Stirling. Continually did she impress on the child
the glories of her birthplace, so that Olive in after-life, while
remembering her childhood's scenes as a pleasant land of earth, came to
regard her native Scotland as a so