side, with her little bare feet among the heather. She could handle an oar and cast a rod as well as most people; it was her little deft fingers that busked the hooks for the loch, and did a great many useful things besides. Long ago the keeper had entrusted the cares of housekeeping, such as they were, to Morag. It was she who cooked, washed, mended, and kept things going in a kind of way. Occasionally the father and daughter would start on an expedition to the village, which was miles away, to make purchases at the merchant's shop, and lay in a store of provisions before the period of snowing-up came round. These were always red-letter days in little Morag's calendar. Sometimes, though very rarely, there was an attempt made to replace the little tattered tartan frock by a new garment, bought at the general store. If you had happened to look into the hut on a winter evening, you might have seen the father and daughter bending in perplexity over a wooden table, on which were strewn the rough materials for Morag's new frock. Great and many seemed the difficulties in the way, but at last Dingwall would boldly put in the scissors, a big and rusty weapon used for general purposes, and then the various stages of dress-making would be gone through, clumsily enough to be sure; but in process of time, Morag would stand in her finished garment, a more proud and happy little girl than Blanche Clifford, in the latest novelty of her London modiste.

They were a very silent pair, this father and daughter. Often they would wander whole days among the heather together without exchanging words, or sit in the ingle neuk by the fire of peat and pine in dumb silence, while they cleaned guns or busked hooks, during the long winter evenings. But notwithstanding his grim silence, and whatever he might appear to the outer world, to his little daughter Dingwall he was always kind, and she loved him with all the intensity of her still, Celtic nature, and thought that he was the very best father in all the world. During her short, solitary life she had never known anybody else, and had hardly exchanged words with a living soul, old or young. Poor little Morag had grown up utterly untaught. Like the pointers, her playmates, she had grown very clever in some things—in mountain knowledge, in dexterity of fingers and agility of limb. But there were wants in her nature utterly unsupplied, chambers in her heart and soul into which light had never penetrated. Made in the image of God, she had never heard His name; redeemed by Jesus Christ, she knew not that such a One had lived and died for men. Though she had grown in the midst of God's glorious works, she did not guess that He who made the "high hills as a refuge for the wild goats," who "sent the springs into the valleys which flow among the hills," was the loving, pitying Father who had watched her lonely wanderings, and would bring this blind child by a way that she knew not, and make "darkness light before her!"

Most of the children of Scotland learn at least to read and write at the parish school, so Morag Dingwall's case was therefore an exceptional one, and arose partly from her peculiar circumstances. She was an hourly necessity to her father, who, besides, held in scorn other training than that which loch and mountain afforded. The few books which the hut contained led quite a fossil existence; they were stowed away by the careful little Morag in the bottom of a great wooden box, her mother's kist, in the depths of which all the valuables were buried to save them from the inroads of the weather, when the pelting rain beat through the broken roof, as it often did. Still, these buried musty books had a great fascination for Morag; often she would peer curiously into them, and long to know what they contained. She often wondered whether her father understood their contents; she thought not; but so great was her under-current of shyness that she had never ventured to ask him. Often on a quiet afternoon, when her work was done, she would slip one of the old books from its hiding-place, and lying down on the soft turf, would ponder over its unknown characters, with an intense longing to understand them. She felt sure that those closely-printed pages must contain much that it would be delightful to know; but they were not for her. With a sigh she would close the book, and gaze up at the fathomless blue sky and the everlasting hills around her; and sitting at the feet of the great, wonderful mother Nature, she learnt from her many things that books could not have taught her.

Morag had a true eye for beauty. It is sometimes said that mountaineers do not appreciate the scenery amid which their lot is cast; and perhaps it is so far true, that when the stern hard necessities of life multiply, they may dull the sense of the wonder and glory of nature in minds which were originally sensitive to it. With our little Morag, however, this deadening process had not begun. She revelled in all the beauties of her mountain home; with a poet's love she gave voices to the brooks and woods, and peopled in her imagination the solemn pine forest, the gloomy ravine, and the breezy mountain top.

The Glen was many miles from the nearest parish, with its church and school. There were dwellers in Glen Eagle who went to both, but the keeper Dingwall was not one of them; and so it happened, strange as it may seem, that little Morag had never been within a church, never heard a sweet psalm sung, nor joined in a prayer to God.

On the still Sunday mornings she would sometimes watch the straggling dwellers in the valley wending their way along the white hilly road to meet in the little village kirk. Morag often glanced wistfully towards it, when she went with her father to make their purchases at the merchant's shop, but then it was always closed and silent. How much she wished that she could see it on the day when the people all gathered there! She had a vague idea that the little company went to worship a God who lived far, far away in the blue sky, where her mother had gone, somebody told her once, long ago; and since then she had not cared quite so much to go to the grave under the shadow of the hill, but loved more than ever to gaze into the blue sky, and to watch the sunset glories before the amber clouds closed upon the many-colored brightness of the evening sky.

Somehow Morag always felt more lonely on Sunday than on any other day. In the long still afternoon, when her father went for a walk with the dogs, she would wander down from the rocky shieling into the pine forest, which was a great haunt of hers—the fir-wood, she always called it. Sometimes she took one of the old books with her, and lying down among the brown fir-needles, she would gaze longingly at the unknown characters. She noticed that most of the church-goers carried books with them, which she discovered to be identical with one of the musty collection in the old kist: so a halo of mystery grew up round this book, which seemed to belong to everybody; and Morag longed that she could find the key to it as she looked up from the yellow pages of her mother's Bible, and gazed dreamily through the dark aisles of pine at the blue sky.

Happy are we that this Book of Life is an open page to us! But if it is, though an open, a dull listless page, if our hearts do not burn within us as we read its words, then more unhappy are we than this lonely untaught maiden, this seeker after God; for of such He has said, "They that seek me early shall find me!"

Morag had her code of right and wrong, which she held to with much more firmness than some who have the knowledge of a living, present Helper, along with the voice of conscience.