at all tired, and how can fresh air and sunshine make one melancholy?"

"Maybe, now, sad thoughts are catching. I was having a few. Eh? What?"

"I don't know. Why were you having sad thoughts?"

"Well, then, I really can't understand why. There's no need to fret over
changes. At the long end the great change puts all right. Charlotte, I
have been coming to Barf Latrigg's shearings for about half a century. I
remember the first. I held my nurse's hand, and wore such a funny little
coat, and such a big lace collar. And, dear me! it was just such a day
as this, thirty-two years ago, that your mother walked up to the
shearing with me, Charlotte; and I asked her if she would be my wife,
and she said she would. Thou takes after her a good deal; she had the
very same bright eyes and bonny face, and straight, tall shape thou has
to-day. Barf Latrigg was sixty then, turning a bit gray, but able to
shear with any man they could put against him. He'll be ninety now; but
his father lived till he was more than a hundred, and most of his
fore-elders touched the century. He's had his troubles too."

"I never heard of them."

"No. They are dead and buried. A dead trouble may be forgot: it is the
living troubles that make the eyes dim, and the heart fail. Yes, yes;
Barf is as happy as a boy now, but I remember when he was back-set and
fore-set with trouble. In life every thing goes round like a cart-wheel.
Eh? What?"

In a short time they reached the outer wall of the farm. They were eight
hundred feet above the valley; and looking backwards upon the woods from