She kept looking along the road which showed itself between the self-sown birches that clothed the valley. The answer to her note came in the shape of a dilapidated pony-chaise with a pony in it, whose multifarious occupations left it saddened and subdued in appearance, requiring much persuasion to make it go with any approach to speed. It crept down the hills and it crawled up them, and its winter coat was already thick enough to render it absolutely impervious to a whip, which had grown shorter and lost its lash in service against it. That pony might with much truth have said to any one trying to urge it on, "It amuses you and does not hurt me." Mrs. Dorriman on those rare occasions when she had occasion to go to the nearest town, nine miles off, had borrowed this little turn-out from the farmer who kept it for his invalid mother, and she knew the pony well; when she saw it coming she folded up her letter and went upstairs, putting on her things as though she was going to church, and standing at the door ready to get in when it drew up there. The rosy-cheeked boy who drove, was gifted by nature with no desire for conversation, and Mrs. Dorriman took a book to beguile the tediousness of the way, which she read, as we do at times, without taking in the sense of it, her mind full of the approaching change, and the plan she had suddenly made, and which was at variance with all the previous habits of her life. That love of beautiful scenery which few people are really born without, made her from time to time raise her head and look around her. High overhead towered the hills on either side, with their huge rents and rifts clothed with mosses, and here and there a patch of grass upon which the hardy little mountain sheep clustered. Lower down, the natural birch-woods were a mass of gold, their colour enhanced by the swaying movement of their graceful boughs, which caught the sunlight and kept it dancing there. One chain of lochs after another swept down the strath with wooded promontories and islands, and the hills rose "peak above peak," carrying the thoughts upwards to that heaven they seemed to reach. There was movement in the air, but the wind, though coming up the strath from the sea, was soft and mild. From a few cottages, that looked miserable enough and yet were warm within, came that smell of peat which to those whose foot has trod the heather all their lives is full of pleasant associations--of fine days, when a bowl of milk and a hunch of oaten bread was enjoyed after the keen air; of wet days, when, wandering far on pony-back and overtaken by the rain, a peat-fire had brought warmth, and comfort, and that real hospitality, which somehow never fails amongst the poor. Mrs. Dorriman in her whole life had been indebted to the poor for all the love and real kindness she had ever known--many a kind woman pitying the motherless child, had cheered her, many a man remembering the sweet sad face of the mother who had lived