er. So were the birch-trees in the
distance, and the one laburnum which stood in a corner of Mistress
Beaton's garden. She sighed as she gazed.

"The simmer will soon be here, and it'll soon be over again. It's but a
blink noo," she said to herself, "but if the morn is like this day,
we'll mak' the best o' it. I'se hae the bairns up to the Stanin'
Stanes. The wind there will blaw awa' what's left o' the kink-hoast
among them. They'll be a' keen eneuch to get there for the sake o' the
ploy, and if they're weel eneuch for the like o' that, their mithers
will hardly hae the face to keep them langer frae the school. And it is
high time they were comin' back again," added she, thinking less,
perhaps, of their loss of lore than of the additional penny a week which
each returning one would bring to her limited housekeeping.

She was a tall, gaunt woman, with a wrinkled, unhappy-looking face and
weary eyes. Her grey hair showed a little under the mob cap, closely
bound round her head with a broad, black ribbon, and her spectacles,
tied with a string for safety, rested high on her furrowed forehead.
She wore the usual petticoat of dark winsey, and her short gown of some
dark-striped print fell a little below the knee. A large cotton
kerchief was spread over her shoulders and fastened snugly across her
breast. Her garments were worn and faded, but perfectly neat and clean,
and she looked, as she was, a decent, but not very cheery old woman.
She had an uncertain temper, her friends allowed, and even those who
were not so friendly acknowledged that "her lang warstle wi' the bairns
o' twa generations, to say nothing of other troubles that had fallen to
her lot, might weel account for, and even excuse that."

She turned into the house at last, and began gathering together the
dog-eared Bibles and Testaments, and the tattered catechisms, and
"Proverbs of Solomon," which were the only books approved or used in her
school, and placed them in a wooden tray by the door. She gave a brief
examination to the stockings which the lassies had been knitting in the
afternoon, muttering and shaking her head as she held them up to the
light. The mistakes in some of them she set right, and from some of
them she pulled out the "wires," sticking them into the balls of
worsted, with some anticipatory pleasure at the thought of the
consternation of the "careless hizzies" to whom they belonged.

Then the forms were set back, and "the tawse