distance of her shop, but no one thought of going to another. All respected the feeling that made the old woman cling to the spot which had witnessed her youth, her marriage, and her old age. She had wedded, early in life, one of the gardeners of the "Great House," who, to use that common but most expressive phrase, had turned out "no better than he should do." Luckily, going home one night in a state of intoxication, he broke his neck—an event Mrs. Bird deplored much more than her neighbours thought necessary. However, it was not that sort of grief which requires consolation; and the widow was not tempted to forget the miseries of her first marriage in the happiness of a second. She never gave hope that triumph over experience, which Dr. Johnson so ungallantly declares a second wedding to be. Years after years rolled away, and Mrs. Bird and her shop seemed as much part of the moor as the stunted furze-bushes. No one dreamt of change till the morning of the murder, and then, as we have said, every body had foreseen what the old woman's living by herself, in such an out-of-the-way place, would come to.
Human nature is accused of much more selfishness than it really has; a thousand kindly emotions break in upon and redeem our daily and interested life. As Wordsworth beautifully says—
"The poorest poor
Long for some moments in a weary life,
When they can know and feel that they have been
