leep on the same chaff-mattress, and she
hears, during the dead of the night, her daughter's slightest moan. Her
voice is not rough at all when the poor old creature is saying her
prayers; nor, we may be well assured, is its lowest whisper unheard in
heaven.

Your eyes are wandering away to the eastern side of the vale, and they
have fixed themselves on the Cottage of the SEVEN OAKS. The grove is a
noble one; and, indeed, those are the only timber-trees in the valley.
There is a tradition belonging to the grove, but we shall tell it some
other time; now, we have to do with that mean-looking Cottage, all
unworthy of such magnificent shelter. With its ragged thatch it has a
cold cheerless look--almost a look of indigence. The walls are sordid in
the streaked ochre-wash--a wisp of straw supplies the place of a broken
pane--the door seems as if it were inhospitable--and every object about
is in untended disorder. The green pool in front, with its floating
straws and feathers, and miry edge, is at once unhealthy and needless;
the hedgerows are full of gaps, and open at the roots; the few garments
spread upon them seem to have stiffened in the weather, forgotten by the
persons who placed them there; and half-starved young cattle are
straying about in what once was a garden. Wretched sight it is; for that
dwelling, although never beautiful, was once the tidiest and best-kept
in all the district. But what has misery to do with the comfort of its
habitation?

The owner of that house was once a man well to do in the world; but he
minded this world's goods more than it was fitting to do, and made
Mammon his god. Abilities he possessed far beyond the common run of men,
and he applied them all, with all the energy of a strong mind, to the
accumulation of wealth. Every rule of his life had that for its ultimate
end; and he despised a bargain unless he outwitted his neighbour.
Without any acts of downright knavery, he was not an honest man--hard to
the poor--and a tyrannical master. He sought to wring from the very soil
more than it could produce; his servants, among whom were his wife and
daughter, he kept at work, like slaves, from twilight to twilight; and
was a forestaller and a regrater--a character which, when Political
Economy was unknown, was of all the most odious in the judgment of
simple husbandmen. His spirits rose with the price of meal, and every
handful dealt out to the beggar was paid like a tax. What could the
Bible