y likely.--What is your name, my child?"

"Baubie Wishart, mem." She spoke in an apologetic tone, glancing down at
her feet, the one off duty being lowered for the purpose of inspection,
which over, she hoisted the foot again immediately into the recesses of
the Rob Roy tartan.

"Have you a father and mother?"

"Yes, mem."

"What does your father do?"

Baubie Wishart glanced down again in thought for an instant, then raised
her eyes for the first time directly to her questioner's face: "He used
to be a Christy man, but he canna be that any longer, sae he goes wi'
boords."

"Why cannot he be a Christy man any longer?"

Down came the foot once more, and this time took up its position
permanently beside the other: "Because mother drinks awfu', an' pawned
the banjo for drink." This family history was related in the most
matter-of-fact, natural way.

"And does your father drink too?" asked Miss Mackenzie after a short
pause.

Baubie Wishart's eyes wandered all round the room, and with one toe she
swept up a little mass of dust before she answered in a voice every tone
of which spoke unwilling truthfulness, "Just whiles--Saturday nichts."

"Is _he_ kind to you?"

"Ay," looking up quickly, "excep' just whiles when he's fou--Saturday
nichts, ye ken--and then he beats me; but he's rale kind when he's
sober."

"Were you ever at school?"

"No, mem," with a shake of the head that seemed to convey that she had
something else, and probably better, to do.

"Did you ever hear of God?" asked the lady who had brought her.

"Ay, mem," answered Baubie quite readily: "it's a kind of a bad word I
hear in the streets."

"How old are you?" asked both ladies simultaneously.

"Thirteen past," replied Baubie, with a promptness that made her
listeners smile, suggesting as it did the thought that the question had
been put to her before, and that Baubie knew well the import of her
answer.

She grew more communicative now. She could not read, but, all the same,
she knew two songs which she sang in the streets--"Before the Battle"
and "After the Battle;" and, carried away by the thought of her own
powers, she actually began to give proof of her assertion by reciting
one of them there and then. This, however, was stopped at once. "Can
knit too," she added then.

"Who taught you to knit?"

"Don' know. Wis at a Sunday-schuil too."

"Oh, you were? And what did you learn there?"

Baubie Wishart looked puzzled, consulted her t