honeysuckle filling the air of the little
arbour in which we sat, and his one glass of wine set on the table in
the middle, he would sit for an hour talking away to us in his gentle,
slow, deep voice, telling us story after story out of the New
Testament, and explaining them in a way I have seldom heard equalled.
Or, in the cold winter nights, he would come into the room where I and
my two younger brothers slept--the nursery it was--and, sitting down
with Tom by his side before the fire that burned bright in the frosty
air, would open the great family Bible on the table, turn his face
towards the two beds where we three lay wide awake, and tell us story
after story out of the Old Testament, sometimes reading a few verses,
sometimes turning the bare facts into an expanded and illustrated
narrative of his own, which, in Shakspere fashion, he presented after
the modes and ways of our own country and time. I shall never forget
Joseph in Egypt hearing the pattering of the asses' hoofs in the
street, and throwing up the window, and looking out, and seeing all
his own brothers coming riding towards him; or the grand rush of the
sea waves over the bewildered hosts of the Egyptians. We lay and
listened with all the more enjoyment, that while the fire was burning
so brightly, and the presence of my father filling the room with
safety and peace, the wind was howling outside, and the snow drifting
up against the window. Sometimes I passed into the land of sleep with
his voice in my ears and his love in my heart; perhaps into the land
of visions--once certainly into a dream of the sun and moon and stars
making obeisance to the too-favoured son of Jacob.

CHAPTER IV

Kirsty

My father had a housekeeper, a trusty woman, he considered her. We
thought her _very_ old. I suppose she was about forty. She was not
pleasant, for she was grim-faced and censorious, with a very straight
back, and a very long upper lip. Indeed the distance from her nose to
her mouth was greater than the length of her nose. When I think of her
first, it is always as making some complaint to my father against
us. Perhaps she meant to speak the truth, or rather, perhaps took it
for granted that she always did speak the truth; but certainly she
would exaggerate things, and give them quite another look. The bones
of her story might be true, but she would put a skin over it after her
own fashion, which was not one of mildness and charity. The
consequence was