hen she had ended, that she could not go on
speaking. It was all she could do to keep from crying aloud.

At last she heard her daughter's voice.

"Where have they taken her to?" she asked.

"She is downstairs. So quiet, and peaceful, and happy she looks."

"Could she speak! Oh, if God--if I might but have heard her little
voice! Mother, I used to dream of it. May I see her once again? Oh,
mother, if I strive very hard and God is very merciful, and I go to
heaven, I shall not know her--I shall not know my own again: she will
shun me as a stranger, and chug to Susan Palmer and to you. Oh, woe! Oh,
woe!" She shook with exceeding sorrow.

In her earnestness of speech she had uncovered her face, and tried to
read Mrs. Leigh's thoughts through her looks. And when she saw those
aged eyes brimming full of tears, and marked the quivering lips, she
threw her arms round the faithful mother's neck, and wept there, as she
had done in many a childish sorrow, but with a deeper, a more wretched
grief.

Her mother hushed her on her breast; and lulled her as if she were a
baby; and she grew still and quiet.

They sat thus for a long, long time. At last, Susan Palmer came up with
some tea and bread and butter for Mrs. Leigh. She watched the mother
feed her sick, unwilling child, with every fond inducement to eat which
she could devise; they neither of them took notice of Susan's presence.
That night they lay in each other's arms; but Susan slept on the ground
beside them.

They took the little corpse (the little unconscious sacrifice, whose
early calling-home had reclaimed her poor wandering mother) to the hills,
which in her lifetime she had never seen. They dared not lay her by the
stern grandfather in Milne Row churchyard, but they bore her to a lone
moorland graveyard, where, long ago, the Quakers used to bury their dead.
They laid her there on the sunny slope, where the earliest spring flowers
blow.

Will and Susan live at the Upclose Farm. Mrs. Leigh and Lizzie dwell in
a cottage so secluded that, until you drop into the very hollow where it
is placed, you do not see it. Tom is a schoolmaster in Rochdale, and he
and Will help to support their mother. I only know that, if the cottage
be hidden in a green hollow of the hills, every sound of sorrow in the
whole upland is heard there--every call of suffering or of sickness for
help is listened to by a sad, gentle-looking woman, who rarely smiles
(and when she