old house pretty, must be relinquished, it was true; but, still, at nineteen one can put up with a great deal in the present. There is always the future, so much of the future, like the sky and the plain from St. Michael’s Hill, spreading above, below, everywhere, without limit or bound, save in the eyes which can only reach a certain distance. So Lottie comforted herself for “just now,” and marched on into her life, colours flying and drums beating, taking as little heed as she could of those stragglers who would always fall out of the ranks--her father always shuffling off to some new haunt or other, the places which such men find out by instinct in the least-known locality, and large loose-limbed Law, whose vague career was always dubious, and who could not keep step. Never mind! Lottie herself set out, brave, head erect, eyes straight, all her faculties in fullest attention to the roll of her own cheerful drum. The earliest part of her career here, however, was brightened yet disturbed by a discovery which considerably confused her mind in her outset, and seemed to open better prospects before her. Lottie found out that she had a voice. She had known that she could sing long before, and had performed many a time in the little parlour at Fairford to the admiration of all hearers, singing every new comic song that burst upon the little provincial world from the music-halls in London, and knowing no better, so long as she was a child. There was no harm in the songs she sang, nothing but absolute silliness and flippancy, such as are natural to that kind of production; but as Lottie grew into womanhood, and began by instinct to know better, she gave them up, and knowing no others except some ancient sentimental ditties of her mother’s, gave up singing so far as a musical creature can give up what is another kind of breathing to her. But when she heard the choir in the Abbey church, Lottie woke up, with such a delightful discovery of what music was, and such an ecstatic finding out of her own powers, as words cannot express. She had an old jingling worn-out piano, and had “learned to play” from her mother, who knew nothing about it, except as much as could be taught to a school-girl twenty years before; but this meagre instruction, and the bad instrument, and the half-dozen “pieces” which were all Mrs. Despard’s musical library, had not attracted the pupil, and it was not till she heard the organ pealing through St. Michael’s, and the choristers singing like angels--though they were not like angels out of doors--that Lottie awoke to a real consciousness of her own gift. She had never had any education herself. Though she was so anxious for school for Law, it had not occurred to her that she wanted any schooling. Lottie was narrow-minded and practical. She did not understand self-culture. She wanted Law to learn, because without education he could not do anything worth speaking of, could not earn any money, could not get on in the world.