her, was resolved to exert herself to the utmost. Her first care was to
pay those debts which her mother had mentioned to her, for which she left
money done up carefully in separate papers. When all these were paid
away, there was not enough left to pay both the rent of the cabin and a
year's schooling for herself and sisters which was due to the
schoolmistress in a neighbouring village.

Mary was in hopes that the rent would not be called for immediately, but
in this she was disappointed. Mr. Harvey, the gentleman on whose estate
she lived, was in England, and, in his absence, all was managed by a Mr.
Hopkins, an agent, who was a HARD MAN.* The driver came to Mary about a
week after her mother's death, and told her that the rent must be brought
in the next day, and that she must leave the cabin, for a new tenant was
coming into it; that she was too young to have a house to herself, and
that the only thing she had to do was to get some neighbour to take her
and her brother and her sisters in for charity's sake.

*A hard-hearted man.

The driver finished by hinting that she would not be so hardly used if
she had not brought upon herself the ill-will of Miss Alice, the agent's
daughter. Mary, it is true, had refused to give Miss Alice a goat upon
which she had set her fancy; but this was the only offence of which she
had been guilty, and at the time she refused it her mother wanted the
goat's milk, which was the only thing she then liked to drink.

Mary went immediately to Mr. Hopkins, the agent, to pay her rent; and she
begged of him to let her stay another year in her cabin; but this he
refused. It was now September 25th, and he said that the new tenant must
come in on the 29th, so that she must quit it directly. Mary could not