o die.
'Anything but that,' I said to myself, with a sudden thrill of pain
that surprised me with its intensity.

All this time through the long cold weeks Elspeth had been slowly dying.
Quietly and gradually the blind woman's strength had ebbed and lessened,
until early in March we knew she could not last much longer.

She suffered no pain, and uttered no complaint. She lay peacefully
propped up with pillows on the bed where Mary Marshall had breathed her
last, and her pale wrinkled face grew almost as white as the cap-border
that encircled it.

At the commencement of her illness I was unable to be much with her.
Susan and Phoebe Locke had thoroughly engrossed me, and a hurried visit
morning and evening to give Peggy orders was all that was possible under
the circumstances; but I saw that she was well cared for and comfortable,
and Peggy was very good to her and kept the children out of the room.

'Ah, my bairn, I am dying like a lady,' she said to me one day, 'and it
is good to be here on poor Mary's bed. See the fine clean sheets that
Peggy has put me on, and the grand quilt that keeps my feet warm!
Sometimes I could cry with the comfort of it all; and there is the broth
and the jelly always ready; and what can a poor old body want more?'

When Susan was convalescent I spent more time with Elspeth. I knew she
loved to have me beside her, and to listen to the chapters and Psalms I
read to her. She would ask me to sing sometimes, and often we would sit
and talk of the days that seemed so 'few and evil' in the light of
advancing immortality.

'Ay, dearie,' she would say, 'it is not much to look back upon except in
an angel's sight,--a poor old woman's life, who worked and struggled to
keep her master and children from clemming. I used to think it hard
sometimes that I could not get to church on Sunday morning,--for I was
aye a woman for church,--but I had to stand at my wash-tub often until
late on Saturday night. "After a day's charing, rinsing out the
children's bits of things, and ironing them too, how is a poor tired
body like me to get religion?" I would say sometimes when I was fairly
moithered with it all. But, Miss Garston, my dear, I'm glad, as I lie
here, to know that I never neglected the children God had given me; and
so He took care of all that; He knew when I was too tired to put up a
prayer that it was not for the want of loving Him.'

'No, indeed, Elspeth. I often think we ought not to be too hard