Gradually they came to look upon the sterile coast, unlike, strangely unlike though it was, to the cultivated lands they had left, as their home, at least for some years to come.  Both frugal and industrious, a little cottage was speedily erected, which very soon, from the superior thrift and neatness of its owners, became the best in the place, and as time passed on, they not only continued to gain a subsistence, but succeeded in gathering round them many little comforts, which were the admiration and, sometimes, the envy of their less fortunate neighbors.  From time to time, Mr. Williamson was in the habit of taking a quantity of their chief export, fish, to H——­, and obtaining, in lieu of it, plentiful supplies of food and clothing; and, what his wife and daughter had prized more than all, in returning from his last voyage, he had brought with him a few school-books, with some entertaining works, and several volumes of interesting and evangelical sermons.

Mrs. Williamson, who was the daughter of a small farmer, had, in her youth, received the elements of a good English education.  She could read with tolerable fluency, and had taught her children this important branch; but though, when a child, she had learned to write, want of practice and varied duties connected with her toilsome condition, had almost erased the power from memory; and it was with deep regret at her own neglect, that she found her children growing up as ignorant, as herself, of the power of communicating their thoughts through the medium of the pen.  It was, therefore, with no small delight, that she had hailed Agnes’s welcome offer; and as she sat, evening after evening, in her corner by the fireside, apparently busily engaged in knitting, but, in reality, an attentive listener to the instruction Agnes was imparting to the young people,—­or as she mingled her tones with theirs who, on the Sabbath, warbled, from hearts attuned to devotion, those melodies that had been familiar to her from childhood,—­again and again, would memory revert to the happy days of her infancy and youth, when with beloved parents and friends she had gone up to the house of God, and while a tear of sorrow and penitence would steal down her cheeks, to think how much of the instructions, then received, had been forgotten, she blessed the Parental Hand that had placed beneath her roof, one so fitted to counsel and comfort, to prove to her, as well as to many others, a ministering angel indeed.

Thus, happily and usefully employed, the winter months glided by comparatively swiftly to Agnes.  Not that the past was forgotten,—­not that she never sighed for more congenial society, for the friends of her early youth, or even for the refinement and luxuries by which she had been surrounded,—­that would be affirming too much, for she had a genuine woman’s heart, and that innate perception and love of the beautiful, which delights in the elegancies and embellishments of life, and could not as easily accommodate itself, as some could, to a situation where those are wholly wanting.