"Very fond of them," she said, shaking her head again; "but I know
nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure
it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars
sing some of their lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a
grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have only read and been told
about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them
so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little
way. You don't need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir," she
added with a glance at the small forms and round the room.

All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still
continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in
the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of
observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her
transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that they were
passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful.
Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have
besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere
compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an
impertinence.

He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his
towards the prospect, saying: "Beautiful, indeed!"

"Most beautiful, sir. I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to
sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head. But what a
foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to
any one than it does to me."

Her eyes were turned to it, as she spoke, with most delighted admiration
and enjoyment. There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation.

"And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam
changing places so fast, make it so lively for me," she went on. "I
think of the number of people who can go where they wish, on their
business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me
that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect
with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great
Junction, too. I don't see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very
often hear it, and I always know it is there. It seems to join me, in a
way, to I don't know how many places and things that I shall never see."

With an abashed kind of idea that it