The speaker was a bright, breezy-looking lad in midshipman’s dress, who was sauntering up and down the old terrace at Kirklands, in company with our friend Grace.  She is a year older than when we saw her last at the garden-gate, parting with her two scholars after their first Sunday together.  They have had a great many afternoons in company since then.  Grace had remained in her summer home all through the long Scotch winter, and now autumn had come, bringing with it her brother Walter on a delightful holiday of six weeks, after an absence of years.

Miss Hume had got so frail the previous year, that she was unfit for the return journey to her house in Edinburgh, and the following months had only brought an increase of weakness.  She now lay in her darkened room, with, her flickering lamp of life burning slowly to its socket, while some young lives beside her were being kindled by glowing fires which would cause their hearts to burn long after the “glow of early thought declines in feeling’s dull decay.”

The little company in the still-room had somewhat increased, four others haying been added to the two first scholars.  One of them was Elsie Gray, the forester’s daughter, a pretty little girl with a sweet voice, and able to sing a great many hymns, so that Grace had no longer to perform solos to the still-room audience, but was accompanied by more than one voice timidly following Elsie’s example, and joining in the singing.  There were three other scholars from the borders of the next parish, and a very happy party they all made together.  But it must be confessed that the warmest place in Grace’s heart was reserved for the first scholar whom she had found that chilly spring day among the pasture lands which sloped down to the little stream.  Judged by an educational standard, Geordie was certainly, with the exception of the little Jean, the most deficient of the company, in spite of his having manfully conquered the last pages of the “Third Primer,” and got at last “intil the Bible.”  The other boys and girls still attended the parish school on week days, and seemed more or less very fairly in possession of the rudiments of education.  Some things, however, which they read and heard in the little quiet room at Kirklands sank into their hearts as they had never done when they read them as the stereotyped portion of the Bible-reading lesson amid the mingled jangle of slates and pencils and pattering feet, with the hum of rough northern tongues, which prevailed in the parish school-room.

To Geordie even this discordant medium of education had been denied.  Grace had set her heart on having him sent to school during the past winter.  She saw what a precious boon such an opportunity appeared in Geordie’s eyes when she suggested it to him.  But Farmer Gowrie had to be consulted, and finding the herd-boy useful in winter as well as during the summer months, he decided that he could not possibly spare Geordie.  And as for Granny Baxter, she