[Footnote 1: See _Colin Clout's come home again_.] [Footnote 2: _Vide_ Scott's _Life_.] [Footnote 3: Upton's _Faëry Queen_, Vol. I. xiv.] [Footnote 4: See Wood's _Athenæ Oxonienses_.] [Footnote 5: See Hunter's _New illustrations of Shakspeare_, Vol. II. p. 280.] [Footnote 6: Book II. Canto vi. etc.--See Black's _Life of Tasso_, Vol. II. p. 150.] [Footnote 7: Upton, Vol. I. p. 14.--_Faëry Queen_, Book VI. Canto vi. st. 10, 17.] [Footnote 8: _Vide_ that to Queen Anne.] [Footnote 9: Cornwallis's _Essays_, p. 99.] [Footnote 10: Camden's Remains, folio, 1614, p.164.] [Footnote 11: _Iliad_, Z. 265.] [Footnote 12: _Faëry Queen_, Book VI. Canto x.] [Footnote 13: Sonnet lxix.] [Footnote 14: Sonnets lxxiii, lxxv, and lxxxii.] [Footnote 15: Sonnet i.] [Footnote 16: Sonnet viii.] [Footnote 17: Sonnet xvii.] [Footnote 18: Sonnet lxi.] [Footnote 19: Sonnet lxxix.] [Footnote 20: Sonnet lxxxiii.] [Footnote 21: Stanza 9.] [Footnote 22: Stanza 13.] [Footnote 23: Verstigan's _Restitution of Decayed Intelligence_, p. 226.] MISS WIMPLE'S HOOP. [Concluded.] CHAPTER III. A year had passed since Maddy's flitting. The skimped delaine was sadly rusty,--Miss Wimple very poor. The profits of the Hendrik Athenæum and Circulating Library accrued in slow and slender pittances. A package of envelopes now and then, a few lead pencils, a box of steel pens, a slate pencil to a school-boy, were all its sales. Almost the last regular customer had seceded to the "Hendrik Book Bazaar and Periodical Emporium,"--a pert rival, that, with multifarious new-fangled tricks of attractiveness, flashed its plate-glass eyes and turned up its gilded nose at Miss Wimple from the other side of the way. But Miss Wimple's proud and honorable fund for the relief of the shop, by no means fell off. As she had anticipated, her expert and nimble needle was in steady demand by all the folks of Hendrik who had fine sewing to give out. Her earnings from this source were considerable; and, severely stinting herself in the very necessaries of life by a strained ingenuity of economy, to which the skimped delaine--turned and altered to the utter exhaustion of the cleverest dressmaker's invention, and magically rejuvenated, as though again and again dipped in the fountain of perpetual youth--bore conclusive testimony, she bravely reinforced her fund from time to time. Miss Wimple's repasts were neither frequent nor sumptuous; "all the delicacies of the season" hardly found their way to her table; and in her bleak little nest, for it was now winter, a thin and scanty shawl but coldly did the office of a blanket. But Miss Wimple partook of her tea and dry toast with a cheerful heart, and shivered in her nest with illustrious patience,--regaled by satisfied honor, and warmed by the smiles of courage and of hope.