got to sleep, and in the morning their first words were
about the woman.

"Gien only we hed my mither here!" said Donal.

"Mightn't you try Mr. Sclater?" suggested Gibbie.

Donal answered with a great roar of laughter.

"He wad tell her she oucht to tak shame till hersel'," he said, "an'
I'm thinkin' she's lang brunt a' her stock o' that firin'. He wud
tell her she sud work for her livin', an' maybe there isna ae turn
the puir thing can dee 'at onybody wad gie her a bawbee for a day
o'!--But what say ye to takin' advice o' Miss Galbraith?"

It was strange how, with the marked distinctions between them, Donal
and Gibbie would every now and then, like the daughters of the Vicar
of Wakefield, seem to change places and parts.

"God can make praise-pipes of babes and sucklings," answered Gibbie;
"but it does not follow that they can give advice. Don't you
remember your mother saying that the stripling David was enough to
kill a braggart giant, but a sore-tried man was wanted to rule the
people?"

It ended in their going to Mistress Croale. They did not lay bare
to her their perplexities, but they asked her to find out who the
woman was, and see if anything could be done for her. They said to
themselves she would know the condition of such a woman, and what
would be moving in her mind, after the experience she had herself
had, better at least than the minister or his lady-wife. Nor were
they disappointed. To be thus taken into counsel revived for
Mistress Croale the time of her dignity while yet she shepherded her
little flock of drunkards. She undertook the task with hearty good
will, and carried it out with some success. Its reaction on herself
to her own good was remarkable. There can be no better auxiliary
against our own sins than to help our neighbour in the encounter
with his. Merely to contemplate our neighbour will recoil upon us
in quite another way: we shall see his faults so black, that we will
not consent to believe ours so bad, and will immediately begin to
excuse, which is the same as to cherish them, instead of casting
them from us with abhorrence.

One day early in the session, as the youths were approaching the
gate of Miss Kimble's school, a thin, care-worn man, in shabby
clothes, came out, and walked along meeting them. Every now and
then he bowed his shoulders, as if something invisible had leaped
upon them from behind, and as often seemed to throw it off and with
effort walk ere