in three years, or even a woman or child, we talk about it for three
months, and say it must be our turn next, and scarcely grow accustomed
to it until another goes.

Annie was not allowed to come, because she cried so terribly; but she
ran to the window, and saw it all, mooing there like a little calf, so
frightened and so left alone. As for Eliza, she came with me, one on
each side of mother, and not a tear was in her eyes, but sudden starts
of wonder, and a new thing to be looked at unwillingly, yet
curiously. Poor little thing! she was very clever, the only one of our
family--thank God for the same--but none the more for that guessed she
what it is to lose a father.



CHAPTER VI

NECESSARY PRACTICE

About the rest of all that winter I remember very little, being only a
young boy then, and missing my father most out of doors, as when it
came to the bird-catching, or the tracking of hares in the snow, or
the training of a sheep-dog. Oftentimes I looked at his gun, an ancient
piece found in the sea, a little below Glenthorne, and of which he was
mighty proud, although it was only a match-lock; and I thought of the
times I had held the fuse, while he got his aim at a rabbit, and once
even at a red deer rubbing among the hazels. But nothing came of my
looking at it, so far as I remember, save foolish tears of my own
perhaps, till John Fry took it down one day from the hooks where
father's hand had laid it; and it hurt me to see how John handled it, as