“And so Jabez Clegg has been wasting our leather to make playthings for you?” remarked Mr. Ashton interrogatively, in a not unkindly tone of voice. “No, he hasn’t!” answered little miss, briskly. “He only used the waste tiny bits. I wanted to take a big piece to make a housewife” (a case for thread and needles), “and he would not let me have it. He said he had no right to give it, and I had no right to take it. Was he right, mamma?” [Along with many other vain fashions, “papa” and “mamma” had come over from France to supersede our more sterling “father” and “mother,” with other refugees from the Revolution.] “Yes, my dear, quite right; but I wish my little daughter would not run so much into the kitchen and warehouse among the apprentices,” said the mother, kindly, smoothing down the light brown hair, in which the sunbeams seemed to weave golden threads. “It is not becoming in a young lady.” Mr. Ashton, who had been all the while examining the glowing devices before him, interrupted her with— “I think I have discovered a new faculty in our apprentice. I shall buy Jabez Clegg a box of colours to-morrow. We are sadly in want of fresh patterns, and I think he can make them;” and Mr. Ashton took a large pinch of snuff on the strength of his discovery. And Jabez, for the first time in his life the possessor of paints and brushes, became valuable to his master. CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH. IN THE WAREHOUSE. Mutability is the epitaph of worlds. Change alone is changeless. People drop out of the history of a life as of a land, though their work or their influence remains. A passing word may suffice to dismiss such from our pages. The Reverend John Gresswell had been taken by Death from the Chetham College school-room before more than half the term of Jabez Clegg’s pupilage had run. Dr. Stone’s resignation of his librarianship followed close on his discovery of the half-drowned boy on the dairy-steps. After a long engagement with a young lady who refused many eligible offers, and withstood much parental persuasion for his sake, he—the curate of St. John’s Church—accepted the first vacant living in the gift of the college whereof he was fellow. A bridal closed their almost Jacob’s courtship, and the constant couple retired to the seclusion of Wooton Rivers, where his learning and eloquence had seldom more appreciative auditory than smock-frocked Wiltshire rustics and their families.