m the top of a peat-moss--a coarse peat in fact, more loose
and porous than the peat proper--which they laid close down upon the
fire, destroying almost all remaining draught by means of coal-dust. To
this sealed fountain of light the little maiden was creeping through
the dark house, with one of her _dips_ in her hand--the pitcher with
which she was about to draw from the fountain.

And a pretty study she would have made for any child-loving artist,
when, with her face close to the grate, her mouth puckered up to do
duty as the nozzle of a pair of bellows, one hand holding a twisted
piece of paper between the bars, and the other buttressing the whole
position from the floor, she blew at the live but reluctant fire, a
glow spreading at each breath over her face, and then fading as the
breath ceased, till at last the paper caught, and lighting it up from
without with flame, and from within with the shine of success, made the
lovely child-countenance like the face of one that has found the truth
after the search of weary days.

Thus she lighted her candle, and again with careful steps she made her
way to her own room. Setting the candle in a hole in the floor, left by
the departure of a resinous knot, she opened her box, in which lay the
few books her aunt had thrown into it when she left her old home. She
had not yet learned to care much about books; but one of these had now
become precious in her eyes, because she knew it contained poems that
her father had been fond of reading. She soon found it--a volume by
some Scotch poet of little fame, whose inward commotions had generated
their own alleviation in the harmonies of ordered words in which they
embodied themselves. In it Annie searched for something to learn before
the following night, and found a ballad the look of which she liked,
and which she very soon remembered as one she had heard her father
read. It was very cold work to learn it at midnight, in winter, and in
a garret too; but so intent was she, that before she went to bed, she
had learned four or five verses so thoroughly that she could repeat
them without thinking of what came next, and these she kept saying over
and over again even in her dreams.

As soon as she woke in the dark morning she put her hand under her
pillow to feel the precious volume, which she hoped would be the bond
to bind her yet more closely to the boat and its builders. She took it
to school in her pocket, learning the whole way as s