school she had to pass Granny Baxter's cottage, and after Jean was
installed as her fellow-scholar, Elsie used generally to call and see if
the little girl was ready to start, so that they might walk along the
road together.

Elsie was a pale, fragile-looking girl, who looked as if she had grown
among crowded streets, rather than blossomed in the open valley, with
its flowing river and breezy hillsides. She was a very silent child,
too, with a meek grace about all her movements; her large grey eyes
shone out of her face with a luminous, dreamy light in them, which
distressed her practical, rosy-faced mother, who used to say that she
did not know where Elsie had come by "those ghaist-like eyes o' hers,"
and as for those washed-out cheeks, "there was no accountin' for them
neither;" and the worthy matron would go on to narrate with what
abundance and amplitude Elsie had been ministered to all her life; and
yet Elsie glided about still and pale, with her large eyes shining like
precious stones, generally hungrily possessed by some book which she
held in her hand. She had an insatiable appetite for reading, and had
long ago exhausted the juvenile library attached to the church, while
the few books which comprised the forester's collection had been read
and re-read by her many times. The farmer librarian, who remained half
an hour after the congregation was dismissed on Sundays to dispense
books for any that might wish them, in the room behind the church, had
been obliged to give Elsie entrance to the shelves reserved for older
people, after she had exhausted the youthful library. It is not to be
supposed, however, that by this admission Elsie was allowed to plunge
chartless into light literature. The shelves contained only books of the
most sober kind, the lightest admixture being narratives of the
persecutions of the Waldenses and stories of the Covenanting struggles.
These Elsie read and pondered with intense interest, interweaving the