feeling a tug at my sleeve from my eldest
pupil, who is a girl of precocious shrewdness
and vast second-hand worldly experience.

"How silly of you to give her the money,"
she whispers; "you will never get the
stamps."

I cast a regretful look at the old woman's
hand in which my coin is fast imprisoned, for
my number of shillings is limited—I may say,
very limited. Ailie assures me, as I go out,
that I shall have my stamps without fail
in the morning.

"I should think so," murmured Miss
Amelia, incredulously.

I have now been at Moorbeck eighteen
months and I have not received those stamps
yet. The next day Ailie brought six, and left
them with a small note couched in polite
terms, explaining that she could not procure
more then; but that the five which she still
owed should follow shortly. I was satisfied.
In the afternoon, however, another missive
was presented to me, which ran thus:—

    DEAR FRIEND, Miss GOVERNESS, Ailie Jarvis will
be much obliged if you will let her have the stamps
back again; for Mr. West has sent for some, and I
dare not tell him I have not got any.

                            I remain your dear friend,

                                                            AILIE JARVIS.

The spelling was correct and the writing
legible, and with a smile I hand over the
Queen's portraits to the maid, who departs
therewith.

"Well, you are silly! I would not have
let her have them," cried my pupil; "you
are a goose!"

I deposit the note in my workbox; and,
after slightly ruffling the sleek plumage of
my wise and plain-spoken pupil, I return to
the perusal of my thirty-year-old Review.

I shall never make a more profitable investment
than that shilling; it has yielded
exorbitant interest in the circulating medium
of chat. When I am dull, or idly disposed,
or wearied with the vivid sagacity of my
young friends, I write a letter and carry it to
the post myself; I enter the office, which is
also Ailie's bedroom, and deposit it on the
table with a penny, I do not wish the debt
to be liquidated now, but it rests between us
unforgotten; then I ask after the rheumatism,
the finger-joints, and other chronic ailments
of the venerable public servant, until we
glide into the full channel of retrospective
small-talk; for Ailie is the chronicle of Moorbeck.
She tells me first that in this little
cottage where we both stand she has brought
up fourteen children and two grandchildren;
that her husband for a long time before his
death never did a hand's-turn; that one of
her sons, Henry,—the handsomest and
cleverest of them all,—lay wasting in bed
seven years before he died. She shows me
some letters that he wrote to her, and also
his Bible filled with marginal notes, and the
blank leaves covered with texts appropriate
to his condition. There is a miniature
portrait of him hanging over the chinmeypiece.
It represents a man with a face like Ailie's,
strong and intellectual. What those seven helpless
years must have been! Then, with a hot
flush on her cheek and a sparkle in her faded
eyes, she alludes to another son, who, having
risen in the world, is too proud to acknowledge
his kin.

"I pray God Almighty might humble his
pride yet!" she adds in a tone that has more
of a curse than a blessing in it; but the
indignant auger is quenched as she touches
slightly, very slightly, on the favourite
daughter, who, who—she pauses, and seeing
that the unspoken story is known, says
tremulously, "Oh! she was bonnie, real bonnie!
neither gentle nor simple in all the dale was
half so bonnie as my Alice."

Five of her children, she tells me, three
sons and two daughters, lie buried with her
husband in Moorbeck churchyard; Henry
lies in the old graveyard on the hill at Scarbro',
and of the rest, some are married and
settled in the dale, some have emigrated, and
one is in service. Having got to the end of
her domestic relations, by no means to be
measured by these few brief lines, she
branches out in a general way on things
that have been in Moorbeck since she
remembers.

We go out into the September sunshine,
and stand by the garden gate; every moment
I am departing, but still I don't depart.
Ailie points to Penhill, and asks me if I can
see the beacon. I cannot; my eyes are not
so young as they have been.

"Well, miss," she says, "I remember one
night—it don't seem so long since to me,
though it happened before you were born—
Penhill top was all in a lowe. We were
expecting Bonaparte and the French to land
every day, and on the brow of every hill they
piled a great heap of sticks and ling to set
fire to, so as to alarm the country, you know.
We were just going to bed, the fire was out
and the door shut, when we heard somebody
run by shouting, 'Penhill's blazing!
Penhill's blazing! the French are coming!'

"You may just think what we must have
felt. I turned as cold as a stone first, but the
lads said, 'Keep up your heart, mother;
we'll see them all driven into the sea. They'll
never get to Moorbeck.'

"Then I helped 'em, and they all started out
to go to meet the enemy. All the dale was up;
men a-foot, men on horseback, and the old
Colonel and the Squire amongst 'em. It was
a wet night, and the church bells were going
—it was dismal, mind. Well, the Colonel
took his sword, and he heartened the men on,
and they rade and they rade until they got
nearly to Northallerton: and then, what do
you think?  Why, the French had never
landed at all; it was a haystack on fire that
did the mischief, and the beacons were lit for
miles away. But the best of it was, that