a low stool to the side of the bed, and, laying her head down
on the pillow beside him, she sang, in a voice low and soft but clear as
a skylark's, the sweetest of all the sweet Psalmist's holy songs. It
must have been a weary day for her too. She got through the first two
verses well; but as she began, "Yea, though I walk through death's dark
vale," her eyes closed, and her voice died away into a murmur, and then
ceased. Her brother lay quite still, too; nor did either of them move
when the traveller went forward into the room.

Many sad and some bitter thoughts were in her heart, as she stood gazing
upon them in the deepening twilight. She thought of the time when her
only brother, many years younger than herself, had been committed to her
care by her dying mother. She thought of the love they had borne each
other in the years that followed; how the boy had come to her for
sympathy in his childish joys and sorrows; how he had sought her
counsel, and guided himself by it, in riper years. She recalled with
sadness the untoward events which had interfered to separate him from
her and from his early home as he advanced to manhood. Things had not
gone well with him in the last years of his life, and he sank under a
burden of care too heavy to be borne by one of his sensitive nature.
Now he was dead, and she grieved to think that she, his sister, in her
old age of poverty, could not offer a home to his widow and orphan
children.

The youth and middle age of Mrs Blair had been more free from trial
than is the common lot; but the last few years had been years of great
vicissitude. She was now a widow and childless; for though it might be
that her youngest son was still alive, she did not know that he was; and
his life had been the cause of more sorrow than the death of all her
other children had been.

She had been involved in the pecuniary troubles that had borne so
heavily upon her brother, and when old age was drawing near she found
herself under the necessity of leaving Glen Elder, the home where her
life had been passed, to seek a humbler shelter. Since then she had
lived content with humble means, as far as she herself was concerned,
but anxious often for the sake of those whom she loved and longed to
befriend. She had known they must be poor, but she had not heard of
their poverty from themselves. They resided in a remote and thinly
peopled district in Scotland, where the means of communication were few