her fellow-labourers retired to rest, she employed herself in reaping
her own crops, or providing grass for the cow, and often continued her
toil by the light of the harvest moon till it was almost midnight.
After a number of years thus spent, the expiration of the farmer's
lease occasioned her removal. Her family were now grown up; she could
afford, in consequence, to have recourse to means of subsistence
which, if more scanty, were less laborious than those which she had
plied so long; and so, removing to a neighbouring village, she earned
a livelihood for herself and her infirm mother by spinning carpet
worsted at twopence a-day, the common wages for a woman at that
period.' 'The cottage which she now occupied,' we again quote,
'happened to be one of a number which the Countess of Leven charitably
kept for the accommodation of poor people who were unable to pay a
rent. She, however, considered that she had no right to reckon herself
among this class, so long as it should please God to afford her
strength to provide for her own necessities; and therefore she deemed
it unjustifiable to deprive the truly indigent of what had been
intended exclusively for them. Influenced by these motives, she
removed at the next term to an adjacent hamlet, and here her aged
mother died.' We need not minutely follow her after-course: it bore
but one complexion to the end. She taught a school for many years,
and was of signal use to not a few of her pupils. At an earlier period
she experienced a desire to be able to write. There was a friend at a
distance whom she wished to comfort, by suggesting to her those topics
of consolation which she herself had found of such solid use; and the
wish had suggested the idea. And so she did learn to write. She took
up a pen, and tried to imitate the letters in her Bible; an
acquaintance subsequently furnished her with a copy of the alphabet
commonly used in writing; and such was all the instruction she ever
received in an art to which in after life she devoted a considerable
portion of her time, and in the exercise of which she derived no small
enjoyment. In extreme old age she was rendered unable by deafness
properly to attend to her school, and so, with her characteristic
conscientiousness, she threw it up; but bodily strength was spared to
her in a remarkable degree, and her last years were not wasted in
idleness. 'Her spinning-wheel was again eagerly resorted to; even
outdoor labour, when it could