The marquis, fond of all his grandchildren, had never taken special notice of Molly beyond what she naturally claimed as youngest.  But when it appeared that she was one of the spring-flowers of the human family, so soon withdrawing thither whence they come, he found that she began to pull at his heart, not merely with the attraction betwixt childhood and age, in which there is more than the poets have yet sung, but with the dearness which the growing shadow of death gives to all upon whom it gathers.  The eyes of the child seemed to nestle into his bosom.  Every morning he paid her a visit, and every morning it was clear that little Molly’s big heart had been waiting for him.  The young as well as the old recognize that they belong to each other, despite the unwelcome intervention of wrinkles and baldness and toothlessness.  Molly’s eyes brightened when she heard his steps at the door, and ere he had come within her sight, where she lay half-dressed on her mother’s bed, tented in its tall carved posts and curtains of embroidered silk, the figures on which gave her so much trouble all the half-delirious night long, her arms would be stretched out to him, and the words would be trembling on her lips, ‘Prithee, tell me a tale, sir.’

‘Which tale wouldst thou have, my Molly?’ the grandsire would say:  it was the regular form of each day’s fresh salutation; and the little one would answer, ‘Of the good Jesu,’ generally adding, ’and of the damsel which fell sick and died.’

Torn as the country was, all the good grandparents, catholic and protestant, royalist and puritan, told their children the same tales about the same man; and I suspect there was more then than there is now of that kind of oral teaching, for which any amount of books written for children is a sadly poor substitute.

Although Molly asked oftenest for the tale of the damsel who came alive again at the word of the man who knew all about death, she did not limit her desires to the repetition of what she knew already; and in order to keep his treasure supplied with things new as well as old, the marquis went the oftener to his Latin bible to refresh his memory for Molly’s use, and was in both ways, in receiving and in giving, a gainer.  When the old man came thus to pour out his wealth to the child, lady Margaret then first became aware what a depth both of religious knowledge and feeling there was in her father-in-law.  Neither sir Toby Mathews, nor Dr. Bayly, who also visited her at times, ever, with the torch of their talk, lighted the lamps behind those great eyes, whose glass was growing dull with the vapours from the grave; but her grandfather’s voice, the moment he began to speak to her of the good Jesu, brought her soul to its windows.

This sultry evening Molly was restless.  ‘Madam! madam!’ she kept calling to her mother—­for, like so many of such children, her manners and modes of speech resembled those of grown people, ’What wouldst thou, chicken?’ her mother would ask.  ‘Madam, I know not,’ the child would answer.  Twenty times in an hour, as the evening went on, almost the same words would pass between them.  At length, once more, ‘Madam! madam!’ cried the child.  ’What would my heart’s treasure?’ said the mother; and Molly answered, ’Madam, I would see the white horse spout.’