vant who was rather rough and clumsy.
We liked doing it too, and dear Mrs. Parsley was even better than her
word about making us as comfortable as she possibly could. There was
scarcely a day that she didn't do something 'extra' to please us. This
very evening she had made us some lovely kind of scones for tea. She
said they were a kind she had learnt to make up in the north, and she
'wanted to make us feel at home; it must be a bit lonely just at first,
and such a wet day to begin.'

Wasn't it sweet of her?

Well, as I said, we did justice to the scones, and when tea was over and
all nicely tidied up, we brought our chairs near the fire. For it was
chilly after the rain, and we were glad of a fire. And nurse got out her
knitting--nurse has always got socks for me or stockings for the girls
on hand,--and we began to feel very jolly. We _had_ felt a very little
lonely, perhaps almost an atom homesick, I think, with the dull morning
and the strangeness and the not having father and mother and Hebe, even
though everything was so nice.

'Now for your story, nurse,' said I. 'I hope it's been growing into a
very big one all this time we've been waiting for it.'

'No, indeed, Master Jack,' said nurse, 'it's nothing of the kind. It's
scarce to be called a story at all, and but little worth listening to.'

But we made her tell it all the same. I'm not going to try to write it
in Scotch words, for I don't know Scotch a bit, and I'm not sure that
nurse knows much either, as she's been in England ever since she was
very young. So I'll just tell it straight off; anyway it'll be the sense
of what she said, though she did put in some extra Scotch words. I think
she's rather proud when we have to ask her to explain them.

NURSE'S STORY.

'It was my mother that told it me,' said nurse, 'for it happened to
herself when she was a little girl. She lived at home with her father
and mother and brothers in a good-sized cottage on the Muirness estate,
for my grandfather was one of the head men on the place, which belonged
to old Sir Patrick Muir. They were a good way--five miles or so--from
even a village, and I daresay double as far from the nearest town, which
was only a small one. But in those days people were content with
stay-at-home lives, and they didn't feel dull or lonely even in very
out-of-the-way places. It is a good while ago since my mother was a
child. She was not young when she married, and she was nearly forty when
I