And with a fate-defiant smile, half bitter and half cheerful, Tom rose and went down again to his mates, and stopped their inquiries by—­“What’s done can’t be mended, and needn’t be mentioned; whining won’t make me work the harder, and harder than ever I must work.”

Strange it is, how mortal man, “who cometh up and is cut down like the flower,” can thus harden himself into stoical security, and count on the morrow, which may never come.  Yet so it is; and, perhaps, if it were not so, no work would get done on earth,—­at least by the many who know not that God is guiding them, while they fancy that they are guiding themselves.

CHAPTER II.

Still life.

I must now, if I am to bring you to “Two years ago,” and to my story, as it was told to me, ask you to follow me into the good old West Country, and set you down at the back of an old harbour pier; thirty feet of grey and brown boulders, spotted aloft with bright yellow lichens, and black drops of tar, polished lower down by the surge of centuries, and towards the foot of the wall roughened with crusts of barnacles, and mussel-nests in crack and cranny, and festoons of coarse dripping weed.

On a low rock at its foot, her back resting against the Cyclopean wall, sits a young woman of eight-and-twenty, soberly, almost primly dressed, with three or four tiny children clustering round her.  In front of them, on a narrow spit of sand between the rocks, a dozen little girls are laughing, romping, and pattering about, turning the stones for “shannies” and “bullies,” and other luckless fish left by the tide; while the party beneath the pier wall look steadfastly down into a little rock-pool at their feet,—­full of the pink and green and purple cut-work of delicate weeds and coralline, and starred with great sea-dahlias, crimson and brown and grey, and with the waving snake-locks of the Cercus, pale blue, and rose-tipped like the fingers of the dawn.  One delicate Medusa is sliding across the pool, by slow pantings of its crystal bell; and on it the eyes of the whole group are fixed,—­for it seems to be the subject of some story which the village schoolmistress is finishing in a sweet, half-abstracted voice,—­

“And so the cruel soldier was changed into a great rough red starfish, who goes about killing the poor mussels, while nobody loves him, or cares to take his part; and the poor little girl was changed into a beautiful bright jelly-fish, like that one, who swims about all day in the pleasant sunshine, with a red cross stamped on its heart.”

“Oh, mistress, what a pretty story!” cry the little ones, with tearful eyes.  “And what shall we be changed to when we die?”

“If we will only be good we shall go up to Jesus, and be beautiful angels, and sing hymns.  Would that it might be soon, soon; for you and me, and all!” And she draws the children, to her, and looks upward, as if longing to bear them with her aloft.