this moment the wailing of the baby disturbed the miller's eldest
son as he lay in the press-bed. He was only seven years old, but he
had been nurse-boy to his dead sister during the brief period of her
health,--the more exclusively so, that the miller's wife was then
weakly,--and had watched by her sick cradle with a grief scarcely
less than that of the mother. He now crept out and down the
coverlet to the wailing heap of clothes, with a bright, puzzled look
on his chubby face.

"Mother," he said, "mother! Is the little un come back?"

"No, no!" she cried. "That's not our'n. It's--it's another one."

"Have the Lord sent us another?" said the boy, lifting the peak of
the little hood from the baby's eye, into which it was hanging, and
then fairly gathering the tiny creature, by a great effort, into his
arms, with the daring of a child accustomed to playing nurse to one
nearly as heavy as himself. "I do be glad of that, mother. The
Lord sent the other one in the night, too, mother; that night we
slept in the round-house. Do 'ee mind? Whishty, whishty, love!
Eh, mother, what eyes! Whishty, whishty, then! I'M seeing to thee,
I am."

There was something like a sob in the miller's own throat, but his
wife rose, and, running to the bed, fell on her knees, and with such
a burst of weeping as is the thaw of bitter grief gathered her
eldest child and the little outcast together to her bosom.

At this moment another head was poked up from the bedclothes, and
the second child began to say its say, hoping, perhaps, thereby to