could not greatly pity her, seeing she had such a father, yet old Eppie
had her occasional moments of anxiety as to how the bairn would grow up
without a mother's care. No sooner, however, did the little one begin to
show character, than Eppie's doubt began to abate; and long before the time
to which my narrative has now come, the child and the child like old woman
were fast friends. Maggie was often invited to spend a day at Bogsheuch--
oftener indeed than she felt at liberty to leave her father and their
common work, though not oftener than she would have liked to go.

One morning, early in summer, when first the hillsides had begun to look
attractive, a small agricultural cart, such as is now but seldom seen, with
little paint except on its two red wheels, and drawn by a thin, long-haired
little horse, stopped at the door of the soutar's house, clay-floored and
straw-thatched, in a back-lane of the village. It was a cart the cottar
used in the cultivation of his little holding, and his son who drove it,
now nearly middle-aged, was likely to succeed to the hut and acres of
Bogsheuch. Man and equipage, both well known to the soutar, had come with
an invitation, more pressing than usual, that Maggie would pay them a
visit of a few days.

Father and daughter, consulting together in the presence of Andrew Cormack,
arrived at the conclusion that, work being rather slacker than usual, and
nobody in need of any promised job which the soutar could not finish by
himself in good time, Maggie was quite at liberty to go. She sprang up
joyfully--not without a little pang at the thought of leaving her father
alone, although she knew him quite equal to anything that could be required
in the house before her return--and set about preparing their dinner, while
Andrew went to execute a few commissions that the mistress at Stonecross
and his mother at Bogsheuch had given him. By the time he returned, Maggie
was in her Sunday gown, with her week-day wrapper and winsey petticoat in a