“So I will, Katie, my woman,” said the old man kindly, patting the head of the little drudge as she showed them into a front room; “and mind you and be a good bairn in the mean time, and dinna be ill to her, even if she is ill to you: and now you must tell Miss Jean.” The child fingered a moment. “If ye please, uncle--maybe she’ll no let me speak to you after--is Lettie ever coming back again?” “Maybe, my dear; there’s no saying,” said uncle Sandy. “I will try if she can come to see you, or maybe I will take you to see her; but, Katie, my woman, you must tell Miss Jean.” The little girl went away with a lighter step. “She is a faraway cousin,” said the old man, “a fatherless bairn, poor thing, needing whiles to eat bitter bread; if our bairns come to their kingdom they must take Katie Calder. I think the blood is warmer on our side of the house; any way none of them will grudge the bit lassie her upbringing.” Miss Jean Calder’s best room was furnished with a set of old lugubrious mahogany chairs, and a solemn four-posted bedstead, with terrible curtains of heavy dark moreen. Neither the bed nor the room were ever used, the other apartment serving all purposes of kitchen, parlour, and sleeping-room to its aged mistress and her little handmaiden. They could hear sounds of some little commotion in it, as they sat down to wait. Miss Jean had preparations to make before she could receive visitors. At last, having completed these, she entered the room. She was a tall and very meagre old woman, with very false black hair smoothed over the ashy wrinkled brow of extreme age, and a dirty cap of white net, hastily substituted for the flannel one in which she had been sitting by the fireside in the other room; an old, dingy, much-worn shawl and a rustling black silk apron covered the short-comings of her dress; but underneath the puckers of her eye-lids, keen, sharp, frosty eyes of blue looked out with undiminished vision; and, but for the pinched and grasping expression which seemed to have settled down upon them, there would have been intelligence still in the withered features, which once, too, had had their share of beauty. Some one says prettily that Nature, in learning to make the lily, turned out the convolvulus. One may trace something like this in the character of a family as it descends from one generation to another, as if, the idea of a peculiar creation once taken up, experiments were made upon the race, and gradations of the mind to be produced, were thrown, first into one position and then another, until the climax was put upon them all by the one commanding spirit in which the design was perfected. It is not uncommon. Miss Jean Calder was a lesser and narrower example of the mind of Martha Muir; eager in her young days to raise herself above her comrades, she had repelled with disdain the neighbours’ sons, who admired her; while yet she resented bitterly the neglect with which