to my
appetite or to Mrs. Malone's cookery should attribute it, but certainly
my performance on that occasion called forth unqualified admiration.

I observed during the supper that one of the girls carried a plateful of
the savory dish into a small room at the end of the kitchen, carefully
closing the door after her as she entered; and when she came out,
exchanging with Malone a few hurried words, to which the attention of
the others was evidently directed. The caution I had already received,
and my own sense of propriety, prevented my paying any attention to
this, and I conversed with those about me, freely narrating the whole
circumstances of my departure from home, my fear of Basset, and my firm
resolve, come what might, never to become an inmate of his house and
family. Not all the interest they took in my fortunes, nor even the warm
praises of what they called my courage and manliness, could ward off the
tendency to sleep, and my eyes actually closed as I lay down in my bed,
and notwithstanding the noise of voices and the sounds of laughter near
me, sank into the heaviest slumber.

CHAPTER V. THE CABIN.

Before day broke the stir and bustle of the household awoke me, and
had it not been for the half-open door, which permitted a view of the
proceedings in the kitchen, I should have been sadly puzzled to remember
where I was. The cheerful turf fire, the happy faces, and the pleasant
voices all reminded me of the preceding night, and I lay pondering over
my fortunes, and revolving within myself many a plan for the future.

In all the daydreams of ambition in which youth indulges, there is this
advantage over the projects of maturer years,--the past never mingles
with the future. In after life our bygone existence is ever tingeing the
time to come; the expectations friends have formed of us, the promises
we have made to our own hearts, the hopes we have created, seem to
pledge us to something which, if anattained, sounds like failure. But
in earlier years, the budding consciousness of our ability to reach the
goal doea but stimulate us, and never chills our efforts by the dread
of disappointment; we have, as it were, only bound ourselves in
recognizances with our own hearts,--the world has not gone bail for us,
and our falling short involves not the ruin of others, nor the loss of
that self-respect which is but the reflex of the opinion of society. I
felt this strongly; and the more I ruminated on it, the more