My mother was twice married. She never spoke of her first husband, and it isonly from other people that I have learnt what little I know about him. Ibelieve she was scarcely seventeen when she was married to him: and he wasbarely one-and-twenty. He rented a small farm up in Cumberland, somewheretowards the sea-coast; but he was perhaps too young and inexperienced to havethe charge of land and cattle: anyhow, his affairs did not prosper, and he fellinto ill health, and died of consumption before they had been three years manand wife, leaving my mother a young widow of twenty, with a little child onlyjust able to walk, and the farm on her hands for four years more by the lease,with half the stock on it dead, or sold off one by one to pay the more pressingdebts, and with no money to purchase more, or even to buy the provisions neededfor the small consumption of every day. There was another child coming, too;and sad and sorry, I believe, she was to think of it. A dreary winter she musthave had in her lonesome dwelling, with never another near it for miles around;her sister came to bear her company, and they two planned and plotted how tomake every penny they could raise go as far as possible. I can’t tell youhow it happened that my little sister, whom I never saw, came to sicken anddie; but, as if my poor mother’s cup was not full enough, only afortnight before Gregory was born the little girl took ill of scarlet fever,and in a week she lay dead. My mother was, I believe, just stunned with thislast blow. My aunt has told me that she did not cry; aunt Fanny would have beenthankful if she had; but she sat holding the poor wee lassie’s hand andlooking in her pretty, pale, dead face, without so much as shedding a tear. Andit was all the same, when they had to take her away to be buried. She justkissed the child, and sat her down in the window-seat to watch the little blacktrain of people (neighbours—my aunt, and one far-off cousin, who were allthe friends they could muster) go winding away amongst the snow, which hadfallen thinly over the country the night before. When my aunt came back fromthe funeral, she found my mother in the same place, and as dry-eyed as ever. Soshe continued until after Gregory was born; and, somehow, his coming seemed toloosen the tears, and she cried day and night, till my aunt and the otherwatcher looked at each other in dismay, and would fain have stopped her if theyhad but known how. But she bade them let her alone, and not be over-anxious,for every drop she shed eased her brain, which had been in a terrible statebefore for want of the power to cry. She seemed after that to think of nothingbut her new little baby; she had hardly appeared to remember either her husbandor her little daughter that lay dead in Brigham churchyard—at least soaunt Fanny said, but she was a great talker, and my mother was very silent bynature, and I think aunt Fanny may have been mistaken in believing that mymother never thought of her husband and child just because she never spokeabout them. Aunt Fanny was older than my mother, and had a way of treating herlike a child; but, for all that, she was a kind, warm-hearted creature, whothought more of her sister’s welfare than she did of her own and it wason her bit of money that they principally lived, and on what the two could earnby working for the great Glasgow sewing-merchants. But by-and-by mymother’s eye-sight began to fail. It was not that she was exactly blind,for she could see well enough to guide herself about the house, and to do agood deal of domestic work; but she could no longer do fine sewing and earnmoney. It must have been with the heavy crying she had had in her day, for shewas but a young creature at this tim