ould be no one to see her bright handiwork. Yet, sad to tell,
there lay the broad sheet of crimson and gold day after day unnoticed
and unheeded, till, in despair, it at length began to wither and blacken
and die.

For this was a lonely moor, where the heather and gorse bloomed so
bravely, so lonely that even along the road which skirted it the number
of those who passed by in a day could be counted on the fingers of your
hand; and as for the moor itself, it seldom had any visitors but the
cows from the little farm which nestled away in one corner; and do you
suppose such lazy, cupboard-loving creatures cared whether the heather
bloomed or not, so long as they found grass enough to eat?

But the glorious moor had a worse indignity than this to endure, for
there was a cottage here and there whose inhabitants frequently crossed
by the beaten tracks, and never so much as lifted their eyes as they
passed along, to notice the gorgeous dress their moor had put on. They
were so used to it. Had she not worn it every year since they could
remember? and so they sauntered by, thinking about eating or drinking,
or how they would serve their neighbours out, sometimes even quarrelling
loudly, and never giving so much as a passing thought to all the beauty
God had spread around them, and which we who dwell in towns would give
so much to see.

The sun was shining down very hotly, but it had not yet begun to wither
the heather and gorse, on the day when I want you to notice two little
children going across the moor. I told you there were cottages here and
there, and in a pretty little green hollow just beyond a fair-sized
hillock was one where lived the MacDougalls. These two children were
Elsie and Duncan MacDougall. They very often crossed the moor, for the
farm was on the other side of it, and the milk and butter had all to be
fetched from it, the milk twice a day, whether the sun blazed, or the
chilly Scottish drizzle blotted out the hills in a misty haze, or the
north wind swept across it, and shook the gaunt fir-trees to and fro in
its noisy wrath.

"Ain't you coming on, Elsie?" Duncan cried impatiently, for Elsie had
seated herself on a big stone, pushed back her sun-bonnet from her damp
freckled forehead, crossed her brown arms defiantly over her holland
pinafore, and was swinging her bare feet as if she never meant to move
another step to-night.

"No, I ain't coming, Duncan, and that's all about it," Elsie replied,
sulkil