so beautiful as thou, to break the stillness of a home
that wants but one blessing to make it perfectly happy! Yet there are
few or none to lay a hand on that golden head, or leave a kiss upon its
ringlets. The father of Alice Elleray was a wild and reckless youth,
and, going to the wars, died in a foreign land. Her mother soon faded
away of a broken heart;--and who was to care for the orphan child of the
forgotten friendless? An old pauper who lives in that hut, scarcely
distinguishable from the shielings of the charcoal-burners, was glad to
take her from the parish for a weekly mite that helps to eke out her own
subsistence. For two or three years the child was felt a burden by the
solitary widow; but ere she had reached her fifth summer, Alice Elleray
never left the hut without darkness seeming to overshadow it--never
entered the door without bringing the sunshine. Where can the small,
lonely creature have heard so many tunes, and airs, and snatches of old
songs--as if some fairy bird had taught her melodies of fairyland? She
is now in her tenth year, nor an idler in her solitude. Do you wish for
a flowery bracelet for the neck of a chosen one, whose perfumes may
mingle with the bosom-balm of her virgin beauty? The orphan of Wood-edge
will wreath it of blossoms cropt before the sun hath melted the dew on
leaf or petal. Will you be for carrying away with you to the far-off
city some pretty little sylvan toy, to remind you of Ambleside and
Rydal, and other beautiful names of beautiful localities near the lucid
waters of Windermere? Then, Lady! purchase, at little cost, from the
fair basket-maker, an ornament for your parlour, that will not disgrace
its fanciful furniture, and, as you sit at your dreamy needlework, will
recall the green forest glades of Brathy or Calgarth. Industrious
creature! each day is to thee, in thy simplicity, an entire life. All
thoughts, all feelings, arise and die in peace between sunrise and
sunset. What carest thou for being an orphan! knowing, as thou well
dost, that God is thy father and thy mother, and that a prayer to Him
brings health, food, and sleep to the innocent.

Letting drop a curtsy, taught by Nature, the mother of the Graces, Alice
Elleray, the orphan of Wood-edge, without waiting to be twice bidden,
trills, as if from a silver pipe, a wild, bird-like warble, that in its
cheerfulness has now and then a melancholy fall, and, at the close of
the song, hers are the only eyes that a