erent. He would often find himself in a
similar case; but the neglect would make no impression on his
conscience; or if it did, he would struggle hard to keep down the sense
of dissatisfaction which strove to rise within him, and enjoy himself
in spite of it.

Annie, again, accepted such as her doom, and went about gently unhappy,
till neglect was forgotten in performance. There is nothing that can
wipe out wrong but right.

And still she haunted George Macwha's workshop, where the boat soon
began to reveal the full grace of its lovely outlines. Of all the works
of man's hands, except those that belong to Art, a boat is the
loveliest, and, in the old sense of the word, the _liveliest_. Why is
this? Is it that it is born between Wind and Water?--Wind the father,
ever casting himself into multitudinous shapes of invisible tides,
taking beauteous form in the sweep of a "lazy-paced cloud," or
embodying a transient informing freak in the waterspout, which he draws
into his life from the bosom of his mate;--Water, the mother, visible
she, sweeping and swaying, ever making and ever unmade, the very
essence of her being--beauty, yet having no form of her own, and yet
again manifesting herself in the ceaseless generation of passing forms?
If the boat be the daughter of these, the stable child of visible and
invisible subtlety, made to live in both, and shape its steady course
between their varying and conflicting forces--if her Ideal was modelled
between the flap of airy pinions and the long ranging flow of the
serpent water, how could the lines of her form fail of grace?

Nor in this case were the magic influences of verse wanting to mould
and model a boat which from prow to stern should be lovely and
fortunate. As Pandemonium

"Rose like an exhalation, with the sound
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,"

so the little boat grew to the sound of Annie's voice uttering not
Runic Rhymes, but old Scotch ballads, or such few sweet English poems,
of the new revelation, as floated across her way, and folded their
butterfly wings in her memory.

I have already said that reading became a great delight to her. Mr
Cowie threw his library, with very little restriction, open to her; and
books old and new were all new to her. She carried every fresh one home
with a sense of riches and a feeling of _upliftedness_ which I can ill
describe. She gloated over the thought of it, as she held it tight in
her hand, with feelings re