not been ready; for the axe lay beside a piece of coal half splintered, for the necessities of the diminished fire. An industrious house too, wherein the birr of the wheel and the sneck of the reel had sounded: the pirn was half filled, and the wisp, from which the thread had been drawn, lay over the back of a chair, as it had been taken from the waist of the servant maid. But why should not the sluttish girl's bed have been made at a time of the day when a goose was roasting for dinner? Nor did Geordie try to answer, because the question was as far from his wondering mind, as the time when he stood there himself enchanted was from the period of that marvellous dereliction. With eyes rounder, and wider, and considerably glegger, than when he left goodwife Christian snoring in her bed, so unconscious of what her husband was to see, he retraced his steps to the kitchen-door, and turning to the right, opened that next to him. It was the dining-room. He peered about as his wonder still grew. The long oak-table, in place of the modern sideboard, ran along the farther end, whereon were decanters and two silver cups; and not far from these a salver, with a shrivelled lump, hard as whinstone, and of the form of a loaf, with a knife lying alongside. The very cushion of the settee opposite to the fireplace had preserved upon it the indentation of a human head. But much less wonderful was the cloth-covered table, with salt-cellars and spice-boxes, and plates, with knives and forks appropriated to each; for had not Geordie seen the goose at the fire in the kitchen! The indispensable pictures, too, were all round on the dingy walls--every one a portrait--staring through dust; and a special one of a female, with voluminous silks, and a high flour-starched toupee, claimed the charmed eye of the blacksmith. Even in the vertigo of his wonder, he looked stedfastly at that beautiful face; nor did the painted eye look less stedfastly at him, as if, after twenty years, it was again charmed by the vision of a living man, to the withdrawing of that eye from the figure alongside of her, so clearly that of her husband. That they were master and mistress of this very house he would have concluded, if he had been calm enough to think; but he was, alas, still under the soufflé of the bellows of romantic wonder.