hard, smacking puffs, but with a more comfortable expression than Hughie
had yet seen him wear. Then, when it was fairly lit, he knocked off the
coal, packed down the tobacco, put on the little tin cap, and sat back
in his covered arm-chair, and came as near beaming upon the world as
ever he allowed himself to come.

"Here, Jessac," he said to the little dark-faced maiden slipping about
the table under the mother's silent direction. Jessac glanced at her
mother and hesitated. Then, apparently reading her mother's face, she
said, "In a minute, da," and seizing the broom, which was much taller
than herself, she began to brush up the crumbs about the table with
amazing deftness. This task completed, and the crumbs being thrown into
the pig's barrel which stood in the woodshed just outside the door,
Jessac set her broom in the corner, hung up the dust-pan on its proper
nail behind the stove, and then, running to her father, climbed up
on his knee and snuggled down into his arms for an hour's luxurious
laziness before the fire. Hughie gazed in amazement at her temerity, for
Donald Finch was not a man to take liberties with; but as he gazed,
he wondered the more, for again the face of the stern old man was
transformed.

"Be quaet now, lassie. Hear me now, I am telling you," he admonished
the little girl in his arms, while there flowed over his face a look of
half-shamed delight that seemed to fill up and smooth out all its severe
lines.

Hughie was still gazing and wondering when the old man, catching his
earnest, wide-open gaze, broke forth suddenly, in a voice nearly jovial,
"Well, lad, so you have taken up the school again. You will be having a
fine time of it altogether."