A WOMAN AND A MAN WERE TRAMPING ACROSS A ROCKBOUND, TREELESS SWAMP, Front

'WHAT A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY IT IS,'

IN ORMOLU SQUARE,

IT WAS NOT TOO LONG OR TOO ILLEGIBLE FOR GRACE'S

T was

was a wild December morning. Dwellers in cities splashed through

the puddles formed by the heavy rain of the preceding night, and fretted against the exasperating wind, which made

it

a struggle to grasp their garments about them, and a still greater struggle to keep their tempers. Dwellers in quiet country places plodded along the heavy roads, and grumbled at the hard conditions of rural existence in such weather. But our story begins with a woman and a lad who were tramping across a rock-bound, treeless swamp, on the largest of the Shetland Isles, and who neither grumbled nor even said a word about the weather, perhaps because they were too much accustomed to its harsh and inclement

moods, perhaps because their hearts were both so full of other things, and that of one, at least, of feelings with which the gloom was more in accord than any sunshine could have been.

The woman was still in the prime of life, scarcely forty years of age, and the tall lad at her side was her eldest child. But Mrs. Sinclair, of Quodda Schoolhouse, had long parted from the last bloom of physical youth, and might have been more than ten years older than she really was. She was a small, slight woman, of nervous and excitable temperament, and life had been, for her, little more than a long endurance. Toil and hardship had worn her frame, anxieties almost amounting to terrors had whitened her hair, but none of them had conquered her spirit of indomitable cheerfulness. She had early made reckonings with her own heart as to what were its absolute necessities, and had found that with her, love, and the power of loving service, far outweighed all privations and struggles, and so had resolutely accepted her full burden of these. Perhaps she had never before felt such a sinking of her soul as she did to day, for at last change and pain were stealing into the very home and home-ties for which she had

wrought and suffered. It was time for Robert,

her first-born, to go in the great world.

out and seek his fortunes

And now the very day of

his departure had come.

'But as it is in the course of nature, it must be the will of God,' said the brave little woman to herself; 'and if one lets one's self begin to cry out against that, one never knows where one may end.'

It troubled her sorely that during the recently past days she had not always been able to restrain her tears. For the sight of them vexed Robert, and had caused him to speak to her more than once in sharp words, and with a morose manner, which she felt sure would return upon his heart to sting it with a tender remorse when he should have gone away out of her sight.

She felt thankful that she did not think she should lose command of herself to-day. All the pathetic parting preparations had been completed, and, with nothing more but the end full in view, a desperate calmness had settled on her.

'When one's pain is worst, one shows it least. I know that,' she decided to herself. 'I believe that is the case with Robert. He has been feeling all the time, like I feel to-day.'