"You
go to your dinner, I'll fetch the butter. You've been running about enough
to-day."
Maggie durst not go back without it, but she stood in the passage till
Nancy returned; and then she put up her mouth to be kissed by the kind
rough old servant.
"Thou'rt a sweet one," said Nancy to herself, as she turned into the
kitchen; and Maggie went back to her dinner with a soothed and lightened
heart.
When the meal was ended, she helped her mother to wash up the old-fashioned
glasses and spoons, which were treated with tender care and exquisite
cleanliness in that house of decent frugality; and then, exchanging her
pinafore for a black silk apron, the little maiden was wont to sit down to
some useful piece of needlework, in doing which her mother enforced the
most dainty neatness of stitches. Thus every hour in its circle brought a
duty to be fulfilled; but duties fulfilled are as pleasures to the memory,
and little Maggie always thought those early childish days most happy, and
remembered them only as filled with careless contentment.
Yet, at the time they had their cares.
In fine summer days Maggie sat out of doors at her work. Just beyond the
court lay the rocky moorland, almost as gay as that with its profusion of
flowers. If the court had its clustering noisettes, and fraxinellas, and
sweetbriar, and great tall white lilies, the moorland had its little
creeping scented rose, its straggling honeysuckle, and an abundance of
yellow cistus; and here and there a gray rock cropped out of the ground,
and over it the yellow stone-crop and scarlet-leaved crane's-bill grew
luxuriantly.
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