After he had seen his mother safely arrived in this shelter, Patie had to set out immediately to deliver his letter. The Mistress was left once more by herself to examine her new resting-place. It was a little room, with a little bed in the corner, hung with dark, unlined chintz. It was also what is called in these regions “coomcieled,” which is to say, the roof sloped on one side, being close under the leads. A piece of carpet in the centre, a little table in the centre of that, three chairs, a chest of drawers, and a washing stand, completed the equipment of the room. Was this to be Patie’s room--the boy’s only substitute for home? The Mistress went to the window, to see if any comfort was to be found there; but there was only the foundery--the immense, black, coaly, smoky yard into which these windows looked; and, a little to the right, a great cotton factory, whence, at the sound of a big bell, troops of girls came crowding out, with their uncovered heads shining in the evening sun. The Mistress turned abruptly in again, much discomposed by the prospect. With their colored petticoats and short gowns, and shining, uncovered hair, the Glasgow mill girls were--at this distance at least--rather a pretty sight; and a perfectly uninterested person might have thought it quite seemly and natural that the black moleskin giants of the foundery, issuing from their own cavernous portals at the same time, should have exchanged sundry jokes and rough encounters of badinage with their female neighbors. But the Mistress, whose son was to be left at this same foundery, awoke in a horror of injured pride and aristocracy to contemplate an unimagined danger. “A barefooted lassie from a mill!--a bairn of mine!” cried the Mistress, with looks aghast; and she drew a chair carefully out of reach of the window, and sat down at the table to consider the matter. But when she looked round upon the bare, mean room, and thought of the solitary lad, who knew nobody in Glasgow, who had been used to the kindly cares of home all his life, and who was only a boy, although a “bairn of mine!” it is not very wonderful, perhaps, that the Mistress should have done even the staid and sensible Patie the injustice of supposing him captivated by some one of that crowd of dumpy daughters of St. Mungo, who were so far beneath the dignity of a son of Norlaw. Even Huntley, far away at sea, disappeared, for the moment, from her anxious sight. Worse dangers than those of sea or storm might be here.