ng thoughts deep and strange in a child of her
years--thoughts of death and eternity. She did not believe Elspie's
words; but if they should be true--if her nurse should die--if this
should be the last time she would ever creep to her living bosom!

And then there came across the child's mind awful thoughts of death
and of the grave. She struggled with them, but they clung with fearful
tenacity to her fancy. All she had heard or read of mortality, of the
coffin and the mould, came back with a vivid horror. She thought,--what
if in a few weeks, a few days, the hand she held should be cold,
lifeless; the form, whose faint breathings she listened to, should
breathe no more, but be carried from her sight, and shut up in a
grave--under a stone? And then where would be Elspie--the tender, the
faithful--who seemed to live but in loving her? Olive had been told that
when people died, it was their bodies only that lay in the grave, and
their souls went up to heaven to be with God. But all her childish
reasoning could not dissever the two.

It was a marvel, that, loving Elspie as she did, such thoughts should
come at all--that her mind was not utterly numbed with grief and terror.
But Olive was a strange child. There were in her little spirit depths of
which no one dreamed.

Hour after hour she lay thinking these thoughts, horrible, yet fraught
with a strange fascination, starting with a shudder every time they were
broken by the striking of the clock below. How awful a clock sounds in
the night-time, and to such a watcher--a mere child too! Olive longed
for morning, and yet when the dusk of daybreak came, the very curtains
took ghastly shapes, and her own white dress, hanging behind the door,
looked like a shroud, within which----. She shuddered--and yet, all the
while, she could not help eagerly conjecturing what the visible form of
Death would be.

Utterly unable to endure her own thoughts, she tried to rouse her nurse.
And then Elspie started up in bed, seized her with burning hands, and
asked her who she was and what she had done with little Olive.

"I am little Olive--indeed I am," cried the terrified child.

"Are ye sure? Aweel then, dearie, dinna greet," murmured poor Elspie,
striving vainly against the delirium that she felt fast coming on. "My
bairn, is it near morn? Oh, for a drink o' milk or tea."

"Shall I go and call the maids? But that dark dark passage--I dare not."

"It's no matter, bide ye till the dayli