interesting to the little girl. Whilst Tamar was under her seventh year,
she never rambled beyond the moat alone; but being seven years old, and
without fear, she extended her excursions, and not unseldom ran as far
as Shanty's shed.

The old man had always taken credit to him self for the part he had had
in the prosperity of the little girl, and Mrs. Margaret did not fail to
tell her how she had first come to the Tower in Shanty's arms; on these
occasions the child used to say,--"then I must love him, must not I
ma'am?" And being told she must, she did so, that is, she encouraged the
feeling; and on a Sunday when he was washed and had his best coat on,
she used to climb upon his knees, for she always asked leave to visit
him on that day if he did not come up to the Tower, as he often did, to
ask for her, and being on his knees she used to repeat to him what she
had been learning during the week.

He was very much pleased, when she first read a chapter in the Bible,
and then it was that he first opened out to her some of his ideas on
religion; which were much clearer and brighter than either Mrs.
Margaret's or her nephew's. How this poor and solitary old man had
obtained these notions does not appear; he could not have told the
process himself, though, as he afterwards told Tamar, all the rest he
knew, had seemed to come to him, through the clearing and manifestation
of one passage of Scripture, and this passage was COL. iii. 11. "But
Christ is all."

"This passage," said the old man, "stuck by me for many days. I was made
to turn it about and about, in my own mind, and to hammer it every way,
till at length, I was made to receive it, in its fulness. Christ I
became persuaded, is not all to one sort of men, and not all to another