s garden, were strangely peaceful and
pretty. Here the vulgar labor of the grindstone was made beautiful and
incredibly poetic.

"Ah!" thought poor Little, "how happy a workman must be that plies his
trade here in the fresh air. And how unfortunate I am to be tied to a
power-wheel, in that filthy town, instead of being here, where Nature
turns the wheel, and the birds chirp at hand, and the scene and the air
are all purity and peace."

One place of the kind was particularly charming. The dam was larger
than most, and sloping grass on one side, cropped short by the grinder's
sheep: on the other his strip of garden: and bushes and flowers hung
over the edge and glassed themselves in the clear water. Below the
wheel, and at one side, was the master-grinder's cottage, covered with
creepers.

But Henry's mind was in no state to enjoy these beauties. He envied
them; and, at last, they oppressed him, and he turned his back on them,
and wandered, disconsolate, home.

He sat down on a stool by his mother, and laid his beating temples on
her knees.

"What is it, my darling?" said she softly.

"Well, mother, for one thing, the Unions are against me, and I see I
shall have to leave Hillsborough, soon or late."

"Never mind, dear; happiness does not depend upon the place we live
in; and oh, Henry, whatever you do, never quarrel with those terrible
grinders and people. The world is wide. Let us go back to London; the
sooner the better. I have long seen there was something worrying you.
But Saturday and Monday--they used to be your bright days."

"It will come to that, I suppose," said Henry, evading her last
observation. "Yes," said he, wearily, "it will come to that." And he
sighed so piteously that she forbore to press him. She had not the heart
to cross-examine her suffering child.

That evening, mother and son sat silent by the fire: Henry had his own
sad and bitter thoughts; and Mrs. Little was now brooding over the words
Henry had spoken in the afternoon; and presently her maternal anxieties
found a copious vent. She related to him, one after another, all the
outrages that had been perpetrated in Hillsborough, while he was a
child, and had been, each in its turn, the town talk.

It was a subject on which, if her son had been older, and more
experienced in her sex, he would have closed her mouth promptly, she
being a woman whose own nerves had received so frightful a shock by the
manner of her husband's death. But,