CHAPTER IX.

I was coming home one day from a tramp toward Cramond Beach, and was
just on the brow of a wooded height looking towards Edinburgh and not
two miles from it, when a heavy thunder-cloud darkened the sky above my
head and pelted me with large drops of ominous warning. On one side of
the road the iron gate and lodge of some gentleman's park suggested
shelter; and the half-open door of the latter showing a tidy,
pleasant-looking woman busy at an ironing table, I ventured to ask her
to let me come in till the sponge overhead should have emptied itself.
She very good-humoredly consented, and I sat down while the rain rang
merrily on the gravel walk before the door, and smoked in its vehement
descent on the carriage-road beyond.

The woman pursued her work silently, and I presently became aware of a
little child, as silent as herself, sitting beyond her, in a small
wicker chair; on the baby's table which fastened her into it were some
remnants of shabby, broken toys, among which her tiny, wax-like fingers
played with listless unconsciousness, while her eyes were fixed on me.
The child looked wan and wasted, and had in its eyes, which it never
turned from me, the weary, wistful, unutterable look of "far away and
long ago" longing that comes into the miserably melancholy eyes of
monkeys.

"Is the baby ill?" said I.

"Ou na, mem; it's no to say that ill, only just always peaking and
pining like"--and she stopped ironing a moment to look at the little
creature.

"Is it your own baby?" said I, struck with the absence of motherly
tenderness in spite of the woman's compassionate tone and expression.

"Ou na, mem, it's no my ain; I hae nane o' my ain."

"How old is it?" I went on.

"Nigh upon five year old," was the answer, with which the ironing was
steadily resumed, with apparently no desire to encourage more questions.

"Five years old!" I exclaimed, in horrified amazement: its size was that
of a rickety baby under three, while its wizened face was that of a
spell-struck creature of no assignable age, or the wax image of some
dwindling life wasting away before the witch-kindled fire of a
diabolical hatred. The tiny hands and arms were pitiably thin, and
showed under the yellow skin sharp little bones no larger than a
chicken's; and at her wrists and temples the blue tracery of her veins
looked like a delicate map of the blood, that seemed as if it could
hardly be pulsing through her feeble frame; while b