a sentence, as if it had been her natural Christian name--which, as in
all infant households, had been gradually dropped or merged into the
universal title of "Mother." My name for her was always emphatically
"The Mother"--the truest type of motherhood I ever knew.

"Love," her husband began again, after a long look in her face--ah,
John, thine was altered too, but himself was the last thing he thought
of--"say what you like--I know what we'll do: for the children's sake.
Ah, that's her weak point;--see, Phineas, she is yielding now. We'll
go for three months to Longfield."

Now Longfield was the Utopia of our family, old and young. A very
simple family we must have been--for this Longfield was only a small
farm-house, about six miles off, where once we had been to tea, and
where ever since we had longed to live. For, pretty as our domain had
grown, it was still in the middle of a town, and the children, like all
naturally-reared children, craved after the freedom of the
country--after corn-fields, hay-fields, nuttings,
blackberryings--delights hitherto known only at rare intervals, when
their father could spare a whole long day, and be at once the sun and
the shield of the happy little band.

"Hearken, children! father says we shall go for three whole months to
live at Longfield."

The three boys set up a shout of ecstacy.

"I'll swim boats down the stream, and catch and ride every one of the
horses. Hurrah!" shouted Guy.

"And I'll see after the ducks and chickens, and watch all the threshing
and winnowing," said Edwin, the practical and grave.

"And I'll get a 'ittle 'amb to p'ay wid me," lisped Walter--still "the
baby"--or considered such, and petted accordingly.

"But what does my little daughter say?" said the father, turning--as he
always turned, at the lightest touch of those soft, blind fingers,
creeping along his coat sleeve. "What will Muriel do at Longfield?"

"Muriel will sit all day and hear the birds sing."

"So she shall, my blessing!" He often called her his "blessing," which
in truth she was. To see her now leaning her cheek against his--the
small soft face, almost a miniature of his own, the hair, a paler shade
of the same bright colour, curling in the same elastic rings--they
looked less like ordinary father and daughter, than like a man and his
good angel; the visible embodiment of the best half of his soul. So
she was ever to him, this child of his youth--his first-born and hi