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 looked in, and asked them if they would make me a cup of tea. This they readily agreed to do, and going to their store, I soon had everything I could wish. While refreshing myself, my eye wandered over the room, which served alike for parlour, bedroom, and kitchen, the groceries being kept in the lean-to. Box-beds had been discarded for two well-appointed four-posters, very different from the gaunt skeletons, with drabby shawls doing duty for curtains, one sees so often in southern cottages. But what struck me most of all were the books. Not only was there a good bookcase, with Goldsmith's "Animated Nature," and the "History of England," in three volumes, well bound, but on a little table by my side I observed Good Words, the Sunday Magazine, St Paul's Magazine, "The Holy Grail," and "The Old Curiosity Shop." I was not surprised to learn that these people were good Presbyterians, and staunch believers in the value of education. The father was taking his rest after his midday meal, reading the newspaper, and I fell into conversation with him and his wife. They told me that their children, a boy and a girl, had to walk every day six or seven miles to school at Whittingham, but they did not speak of it as a hardship, or as an excuse for neglecting to send their children. As to the young people themselves, they evidently loved learning all the more since it had cost them such an effort to obain it.

It was in the churchyard of the parish where they went to school that I met with the following inscription:—

All honour to the land that honours the schoolmaster: What