he pipe upon his long fingers, and the
smile played about his lips as he looked at it.

Turner came up, and "A whistle," said he. "What's the story?"

"Do you know who owns it?" asked Brooks.

"Sandy, I suppose," said the General, who knew the ingenuities of his
only son. "At least, I taught him myself to make an ash whistle, and
this may very well be the rogue's contrivance." He took the pipe in hand
and turned it over and shrilled it at his lip. "Man," said he, "that
makes me young again! I wish I was still at the age when that would
pipe me to romance."

The schoolmaster smiled still. "It is not Master Sandy's," said he.
"Did you never teach the facture of it to your daughter Nan? She made
it yesterday before my very eyes that she thought were not on her at the
time, and she had it done in time to pipe Amen to my morning prayer."

"Ah! the witch!" cried the General, his face showing affection and
annoyance. "That's the most hoyden jade I'm sure you ever gave the
ferule to."

"I never did that," said the schoolmaster.

"Well, at least she's the worst that ever deserved it. The wind is not
more variable, nor the sea less careless of constraint She takes it
off her mother, no doubt, who was the dearest madcap, the most darling
wretch ever kept a sergeant's section of lovers at her skirts. I
wish you could do something with her, Mr. Brooks. I do not ask high
schooling, though there you have every qualification. I only ask some
sobriety put in her so that she may not always be the filly on the
meadow."

Old Brooks sighed. He took the whistle from the General and thought a
moment, and put it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the
moor-fowl pipes in spring. "Do you hear that?" he asked. "It is all,
my General, we get from life and knowledge--a very thin and apparently
meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of
us make it out and some of us do not, because, as it happens, we are not
so happily constituted. You would have your daughter a patient Martha of
the household, and she will be playing in spite of you upon a wooden
whistle of her own contrivance. What you want of me, I think, General,
is that I should make her like her neighbours to pleasure you and earn
my fees and Queen Anne's Bounty. I might try, yet I am not sure but what
your girl will become by her sunny nature what I could not make her by
my craft as a teacher. And this, sir, I would tell you: there is one
misc