fancy, which occasioned him opportunity of exercising his lungs and his shrill little voice all day long and sometimes half the night. It was hard work for poor Frederick Fotherington to try and bury himself in the dismal profundities of his law-books, and the quirks and catches of their citations, when little Sarah had been planted at one end of the great, lumbering cradle in which the first Fotherington might have been rocked,--planted there to be entertained by Tommy, who, inserting himself at the other end, with a hand on either side, loudly rocked the great ark quite across the room from one end to the other, piping meanwhile, like a boatswain's whistle, an interminable ballad of the Fair Rosamond that his sister Margaret had taught him, without ever dreaming of the evil use to which it would be put, and piping the more noisily the more he guessed at Frederick's annoyance. Of the two remaining children, Margaret taught school all day, being a visiting governess in two families; Helen stayed at home and did the house-work and the sewing, for the mother had been an invalid ever since her husband's death and the birth of little Sarah, something over two years ago. This family had yet a trifle remaining of their mother's small dowry, invested, as it had been by their father, in certain bridge-stock, which paid dividends of exactly one per cent. This gave the two children molasses on their bread; the elders ate their bread without it. They had a cow, that fed in the paddock,--a cow lineally descended from a famous Puritan cow of the Fotherington breed,--and from her milk once a fortnight Helen contrived to scrape together butter enough for her mother's morning slice of toast. They completed the inventory of their wealth by mention of an old horse, which every day Frederick harnessed into an antique chaise, in order that he might take his mother for an airing.