ty of asking how it happened that
the Misses Melville were staying with her. She explained their position
in a more matter-of-fact way than Miss Rennie had done on the preceding
night, and then dilated on their virtues, particularly on Jane's.

"So clever, and so sensible, and so willing! There's nothing she does
not understand, and yet, poor thing, she says she must go to the
dressmaking, for with all her by-ordinary talents and her by-ordinary
education, there is not another hand's turn she can get to do. I'm sure
the pains she takes with the bairns at night, I just marvel at it.
There's Tam, she can make him do anything she likes. It is a grand
thing for a laddie when he is just growing to be a man to have such a
woman as Miss Melville to look up to--it makes him have a respect for
women."

"He need look no higher than you, Peggy," said Mr. Brandon.

"Ah! but you see I am not quick at the book learning. I'll no complain
of Tam for want of respect to myself, for he is a good lad, take him
altogether; but then, Miss Jean, she helps him with his problems and
his squares, and runs up whole columns of figures like a lang-legged
spider, and tells him why things should be so and so, and seems as keen
to learn all about the engineering as himself; and she helps Jamie with
the Latin, that he craikit on so lang to let him learn, though for my
part I see little good it will do him, and him only to follow the
joinering and cabinet-making trade; and Tam, he will no be behind, and
he must needs learn it too; and as for her writing, ye could read it at
the other end of the room. And in her uncle's house there was such
order and such government under her eye as there was not to be seen in
another gentleman's house in the country. And yet, poor lassie, she
says there's nothing but the dressmaking for her. And Miss Elsie, too,
writing day and night, and cannot get a bode for her bit poems and
verses, till now she is like to greet her een out over every letter she
gets from London about them. I can see Miss Jean has been egging up Mr.
Hogarth, as they call him--I'm no wishing him any ill, but I wish the
auld laird had made a fairer disposition of his possessions--well, Miss
Jean has been stirring up this Mr. Francis to take them out for the
sake of Elsie, for she is just fading away."

"I like her the best of the two, and she is certainly far the
prettiest. The eldest one is a little too clever for me, and too much
disposed to prea