A New Scheme. 119

 

we should find you, some morning in summer,
baked black as a coal; or else, some morning in
winter frozen so stiff that, when we tried to lift you,
your arm snapped off like a dry twig of elder.”

“Ho! ho! ho!” laughed Willie; “then there
would be the more room for grannie.”

His father laughed with him, but his mother
- looked a little shocked.

“No, Willie,” said his father again ; “you must
make another attempt. You must say with Ham-
let when he was puzzled for a plan—‘ About my
brains!’ Perhaps they will suggest something
wiser next time.”

Willie lay so long awake that night, thinking,
that Wheelie pulled him before he had had a wink
of sleep. He got-up, of course, and looked from
the window.

The day was dreaming grandly. The sky was
pretty clear in front, and full of sparkles of light,
for the stars were kept in the background by the
moon, which was down a little towards the west.
She had sunk below the top of a huge towering
cloud, the edges of whose jags and pinnacles she
bordered with a line of silvery light. Now this
cloud rose into the sky from just behind the ruins,
and looking a good deal like upheaved towers and
spires, made Willie think within himself what a
grand place the priory must have been, when its
roofs and turrets rose up into the sky.