"You see," pursued the host, "Sanna said as how she wouldn't make me trustee, I was too old, and I might be dead, or done something terrible foolish, before the child came of age to take it on itself, to use her very words. So she wouldn't make me trustee, but she put it all into Iver's hands to hold for the little chap. She were a won'erful shrewd woman were Sanna, and I've no doubt she was right." "Iver trustee--for my child!" "Yes--why not?" The Broom-Squire stood up, and without tasting the glass of punch mixed for him, without a farewell to the landlord, went forth. CHAPTER XXXIII. MARKHAM. The funeral of Mrs. Verstage was conducted with all the pomp and circumstance that delight the rustic mind. Bideabout attended, and his hat was adorned with a black silk weeper that was speedily converted by Mehetabel, at his desire, into a Sunday waistcoat. In this silk waistcoat he started on old Clutch one day for Guildford, without informing his wife or sister whither he was bound. The child was delicate and fretful, engaging most of its mother's time and engrossing all her thought. She had found an old cradle of oak, with a hood to it, the whole quaintly and rudely carved, the rockers ending in snakes' heads, in which several generations of Kinks had lain; in which, indeed, Jonas had spent his early infancy, and had pleaded for his mother's love and clamored for her attention. Whether with the thought of amusing the child, or merely out of the overflow of motherly love that seeks to adorn and glorify the babe, Mehetabel had picked the few late flowers that lingered on in spite of frost, some pinched chrysanthemums, a red robin that had withstood the cold, some twigs of butcher's broom with blood-red berries that had defied it, and these she had stuck about the cradle in little gimlet holes that had been drilled round the edge, probably to contain pegs that might hold down a cover, to screen out glaring sun or cutting draught. Now, as Mehetabel rocked the cradle and knitted, singing to the sobbing child, the flowers wavered about the infant, forming a wreath of color, and freshening the air with their pure fragrance. Each flower in itself was without much perceptible savor, yet the whole combined exhaled a healthy, clean, and invigorating waft as of summer air over a meadow. The wreath that surrounded the child was not circular but oblong, almost as though engirding a tiny grave, but this Mehetabel did not see. Playing the cradle with her foot, with the sun shining in at the window and streaking the foot, she sang-- "My heart is like a fountain true That flows and flows with love to you; As chirps the lark unto the tree, So chirps my pretty babe to me. And it's O! sweet, sweet! and a lullaby." But the answer was a peevish moan from the bed. The young mother stooped over the cradle. "Oh, little lark! little lark! this is no chirp, Would you were as glad and as gay as the lark!"