ce's scholars, sitting in the little still-room on
Sunday afternoons, her large tender eyes answering in sympathetic
flashes as the young teacher talked with the little company of those
wonderful days when the Son o Man lived upon the earth, or told them
some story of the earlier times of the world, when God's voice was heard
in the beautiful garden in the cool of the day, or when he guided his
chosen people by signs and wonders.

In those days, however, the gospel tidings were not more to Elsie than
many another pathetic story which she knew, and served simply as food
for her imagination, though Grace's earnest words did throw a halo round
the familiar incidents which the daily reading of a chapter in the New
Testament had failed to do. Yet it was not till some of the sharp
sorrows of life had fallen upon Elsie that those words which she heard
in the still-room came with living power to her heart, and became to her
a light in dark days, a joy in sorrowful times, which nothing was able
to take away from her.

And this was the little girl who used to knock gently at the door of
Granny Baxter's cottage every morning as she passed along the road to
school, arrayed in her pretty grey stuff frock, and with her snowy linen
tippet and sun-bonnet. Sometimes she found little Jean's round smiling
face peering against the peat-stack at the end of the cottage awaiting
her coming, for a great friendship had sprung up between these two,
though they were certainly very different in character. Elsie seemed to
have a brooding protective care over the little unkempt Jean, exercising
a sort of guardianship of her in the new life at school. She would often
come to her rescue when Jean sat pouting over a blurred slate, en which
she was helplessly trying to reproduce the figures on the blackboard, or
give her timely aid amid the involvements of some question in the
Shorter Catechism. It was Elsie who tied the bonnet-strings now, with
more dexterous fingers than Geordie's, and performed many similar kindly
offices besides; and little Jean was already learning from the
forester's daughter many habits of tidiness which her poor, failing
grandmother had not been capable of teaching her.

Sometimes, on their way from school, the girls would find Geordie
perched on the paling of one of Gowrie's fields, while the cattle grazed
within the fences, watching for their coming to enliven a lonely hour
with their talk and news of school doings. His eye