order to study she began to steal time from sleep. She carried a book
with her to the mill, and, like David Livingstone at Blantyre, laid it
on the loom and glanced at it in her free moments. So anxious was she
to learn that she read on her way to and from the factory. It was not a
royal road, that thoroughfare of grim streets, but it led her into many
a shining region.

Her only source of outside interest was the Church. From the Sunday
School she passed into the Bible Class, where her attendance was never
perfunctory, for she enjoyed the teaching and extracted all she could
out of it. She would carry home the statements that arrested and
puzzled her, and refer them to her mother, who, however, did not always
find it easy to satisfy her. "Is baptism necessary for salvation,
mother?" was one of her questions. "Well," her mother replied, "it says
that he that repents and is baptized shall be saved; but it does not
say that he that repents and is not baptized shall be damned." Some of
her mother's sayings at this time she never forgot. "When one duty
jostles another, one is not a duty," she was once told. And again,
"Thank God for what you receive: thank God for what you do not receive:
thank God for the sins you are delivered from; and thank God for the
sins that you know nothing at all about, and are never tempted to
commit."

Mary was a favourite with her classmates. There was something about her
even then which drew others to her. One, the daughter of an elder,
tells how, though much younger, she was attracted to her by her
goodness and her kind ways, and how she would often go early to meet
her in order to enjoy her company to the class.