me in. Please to come right in, Mr. Brimacott," she
added, addressing the Corporal. So they passed through the little low
door into the cottage, and in two seconds the children were standing on
chairs and examining all the treasures on the walls. For Sally had
been a servant at Bracefort Hall, and was never so glad as when little
Dick and Elsie Bracefort came to pay her a visit; first because she
thought there was no family to equal the Braceforts in the whole wide
world, and secondly, because these children had lost their father at
Salamanca just eight years before to a day. And there were wonderful
things on the walls, too. First and foremost there were two coloured
pictures, one of France and Britannia joining hands, with a very woolly
lamb and a very singular lion lying down together at their feet; and
the other of Commerce and Plenty, represented as two very slender
ladies with very short waists, loading Britannia with corn and fruit
and flowers of the brightest colours. The children had heard Sally
tell the story of them fifty times but were quite content to hear it
again--how Sally had bought them of a hawker in the year 1802, for joy
that peace was come at last, and how that wicked Boney had plunged all
the world into war again. Then Dick jumped up and brought down a china
figure of a man in a blue coat on a prancing horse with his hand
pointing upwards, who was no other than Boney, the terrible Bonaparte
himself, as he appeared when crossing the Alps.

"Ah, the roog," said Sally, as Dick flourished the figure. "Many's the
time that I've wanted to throw he behind the fire. He tooked from me
my boy, my Jan; ah, you knows the story of my Jan, don't 'ee, my dear?"
she added turning to Elsie.

"Yes," said Elsie, who had heard the story so often as a mite of a
child that she told it herself with something of a Devonshire accent,
"poor Jan that 'listed for a soldier and went to Portingale to the
wars, and never come back, not he, nor wild Lucy that ran away for the
love of him, nor the boy that was born to them."

"Aye," said the old woman to the Corporal, but smiling sadly on the
child. "Killed he was, so they said, but they couldn't tell how nor
where; and missing they was, but I never could find out nought about
mun, though I hope still to hear somewhat; but it must come soon for
it's ten years agone now, and I reckon that my time's a getting short."

The Corporal nodded; but Dick had brought down anot