grandson.
They strongly show how real an evil poverty is, in even the most
favourable circumstances, when the hour of distress comes. Cowper
ceased to envy the "'_peasant's nest_" when he thought how its
solitude made scant the means of life.' We would almost covet the
hut of Annie M'Donald as described by her grandson. 'It appeared,'
he says, 'as if separated and raised above the world by the
cultureless and elevated solitude on which it stood. Around it on
every side were grey rocks, peering out from among tufted grass,
heath furze, and many-coloured mosses; forming what had been, till
more recently--when the whole was converted into a plantation--a
rather extensive sheep-walk. For an extent equal to more than half
the horizon, the eye might stretch away to the distant mountains,
or repose on the intervening valleys; and from the highest part of
the hill, a little to the eastward, the dark blue of the German Ocean
was clearly visible. It must have been a cheerful spot in the clear
sunny days of summer, when even heaths and moors look gay--when
the deep blue of the hills seems as if softening its tints to
harmonize with the deep blue of the sky--when the hum of the bee is
heard amid the heath, and the lark high overhead. But it must have
been a gloomy and miserable solitude on that night when the
husband of Annie lay tossing in mortal agony, and no neighbour
near to counsel or assist, her weeping children around her, and with
neither lamp nor candle in the cottage. It was only by the 'light
of a burning coal taken from the fire, and exchanged for another as
the flame waxed faint, that she was enabled to watch the progress
of the fatal malady, and to tell at what time death set his
unalterable seal on the pallid features of her husband.'

Long years of incessant labour followed; her children were young and
helpless, and her aged mother still with her. She removed to another
cottage, where she rented an acre or two of land, that enabled her to
keep a cow, and gave her opportunity, as the place was situated beside
a considerable stream, of earning a small income as a bleacher of
home-made linen. The day, and not unfrequently the night, was spent in
toil; but she was strengthened to endure, and so her children were
bred up in hardy independence. 'During the weeks of harvest,' says her
biographer, 'she was engaged as a reaper by the farmer from whom she
rented her little tenement; and when her day's work was done, while