w. Peggy Jackson, that lived near us when I was a girl, was cured of a
waste by a charm."

"What is a waste, Nancy?"

"It is just a pining away. Food does not nourish nor drink strengthen them,
but they just fade off, and grow thinner and thinner, till their shadow
looks gray instead of black at noonday; but he cured her in no time by a
charm."

"Oh, if we could find him."

"Lass, he's dead, and she's dead, too, long ago!"

While Maggie was in imagination going over moor and fell, into the hollows
of the distant mysterious hills, where she imagined all strange beasts and
weird people to haunt, she fell asleep.

Such were the fanciful thoughts which were engendered in the little girl's
mind by her secluded and solitary life. It was more solitary than ever, now
that Edward was gone to school. The house missed his loud cheerful voice,
and bursting presence. There seemed much less to be done, now that his
numerous wants no longer called for ministration and attendance. Maggie did
her task of work on her own gray rock; but as it was sooner finished, now
that he was not there to interrupt and call her off, she used to stray up
the Fell Lane at the back of the house; a little steep stony lane, more
like stairs cut in the rock than what we, in the level land, call a lane:
it reached on to the wide and open moor, and near its termination there
was a knotted thorn-tree; the only tree for apparent miles. Here the sheep
crouched under the storms, or stood and shaded themselves in the noontide
heat. The ground was brown with their cleft round foot-marks; and tufts of
wool were hung on the lower part of the stem, like votive offerings on some
shrine. Here Maggie used to come and sit and dream in any scarce half-hour
of leisure. Here she came to cry, when her little heart was overfull at her
mother's sharp fault-finding, or when bidden to keep out of the way, and
not be troublesome. She used to look over the swelling expanse of moor, and
the tears were dried up by the soft low-blowing wind which came sighing
along it. She forgot her little home griefs to wonder why a brown-purple
shadow always streaked one particular part in the fullest sunlight; why the
cloud-shadows always seemed to be wafted with a sidelong motion; or she
would imagine what lay beyond those old gray holy hills, which seemed to
bear up the white clouds of Heaven on which the angels flew abroad. Or she
would look straight up through the quivering air, as long as