And little man looked on him with his tired eyes, not quite understanding what it meant, nor why Wapsie was crying; and the nurse said-- 'He'd like to be dozin', Sir, he's so tired, please.' So down the poor little fellow lay, his 'Wapsie' praying by his bedside. When, in a little time, poor Dolly returned, her Willie took her round the waist, as on the day when she accepted him, and led her tenderly into the other room, and told her all, and they hugged and wept together. 'Oh, Dolly, Dolly!' 'Oh, Willie, darling! Oh, Willie, our precious treasure--our only one.' And so they walked up and down that room, his arm round her waist, and in that sorrowful embrace, murmuring amid their sobs to one another, their thoughts and remembrances of 'little man.' How soon the treasure grows a retrospect! Then Dolly bethought her of her promise to Rachel. 'She made me promise to send for her if he was worse--she loved him so--everyone loved him--they could not help--oh, Willie! our bright darling.' 'I think, Dolly, we could not live here. I'd like to go on some mission, and maybe come back in a great many years--maybe, Dolly, when we are old. I'd like to see the place again--and--and the walks--but not, I think, for a long time. He was such a darling.' Perhaps the vicar was thinking of the church-yard, and how he would like, when his time came, to lie beside the golden-haired little comrade of his walks. So Dolly despatched the messenger with a lantern, and thus it was there came a knocking at the door of Redman's Farm at that unseasonable hour. For some time old Tamar heard the clatter in her sleep; disturbing and mingling with her dreams. But in a while she wakened quite, and heard the double knocks one after another in quick succession; and huddling on her clothes, and muttering to herself all the way, she got into the hall, and standing a couple of yards away from the door, answered in shrill and querulous tones, and questioning the messenger in the same breath. How could she tell what it might or might not portend? Her alarms quickly subsided, however, for she knew the voice well. So the story was soon told. Poor little Fairy; it was doubtful if he was to see another morning; and the maid being wanted at home, old Tamar undertook the message to Brandon Hall, where her young mistress was, and sallied forth in her cloak and bonnet, under the haunted trees of Redman's Dell. Tamar had passed the age of ghostly terrors. There are a certain sober literality and materialism in old age which abate the illusions of the supernatural as effectually as those of love; and Tamar, though not without awe, for darkness and solitude, even were there no associations of a fearful kind in the locality, are suggestive and dismal to the last.