y
me, and childish voices filled the air as I trudged through the wet
grass. My small ghostly companions seemed to carry in their little hands
quaint-looking dog's-eared books, some of them covered with cloth of
various colors. None of these phantom children looked to be over six
years old, and all were bareheaded, and some of the girls wore
old-fashioned pinafores. They were the schoolmates of my childhood, and
many of them must have come out of their graves to run by my side that
morning in Rydal. I had not thought of them for years. Little Emily
R---- read from her book with a chirping lisp:--

"O, what's the matter? what's the matter?
What is't that ails young Harry Gill?"

Mary B---- began:--

"Oft I had heard of Lucy Grey";

Nancy C---- piped up:--

"'How many are you, then,' said I,
'If there are two in heaven?'
The little maiden did reply,
'O Master! we are seven.'"

Among the group I seemed to recognize poor pale little Charley F----,
who they told me years ago was laid in St. John's Churchyard after they
took him out of the pond, near the mill-stream, that terrible Saturday
afternoon. He too read from his well-worn, green-baize-covered book,--

"The dew was falling fast, the stars began to blink."

Other white-headed little urchins trotted along _very near_ me all the
way, and kept saying over and over their "spirit ditties of no tone"
till I reached the village inn, and sat down as if in a dream of
long-past years.

Two years ago I stood by Wordsworth's grave in the churchyard at
Grasmere, and my companion wove a chaplet of flowers and placed it on
the headstone. Afterwards we went into the old church and sat down in
the poet's pew. "They are all dead and gone now," sighed the gray-headed
sexton; "but I can remember when the seats used to be filled by the
family from Rydal Mount. Now they are all outside there in yon grass."

MISS MITFORD.

_"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace;
You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living streams at eve:
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave:
Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave."_

THOMSON.

VI. MISS MITFORD.

That portrait hanging near Wordswo