A NEW SCENE.

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there is for you, till you have gathered yourself together in a new scene.

"Don't write, but tell Maria how the little girl is? and how your own head is?"

The day of departure soon came. "I remember," says Isabella Ireland, "watching from the windows (Mrs. Carlyle's drawing-room) the loading of the vans. When the third waggon, heavily laden with pretty old carved furniture, started for Haslemere, Mrs. Carlyle shrugged her shoulders and avouched a belief that Mrs. Gilchrist would 'skin, and bury herself alive for the benefit of her children.""

BRO

CHAPTER XII.

SHOTTERMILL.

1862. AGE 34.

ROOKBANK Cottage stands upon the summit of a steep little Surrey hill, at the base of which flows a brook; crossing it, the pedestrian must imagine himself in Sussex, or if he linger upon the bridge and look to the right he faces Hampshire, and half a mile of the stream's course will bring him into that county.

Shottermill is a mile from Haslemere, once a coaching town, en route for Portsmouth and London; and also one of the rotten boroughs. In 1862 Haslemere was still a cosy little town, at whose principal shop might have been bought most commodities ranging from a watering-pot to a ham! This was a shop managed by one Clarke; a barber, who, when tugging at a customer's hair, would give advice as to what not to do in gardening; for instance, not to dig snow into the ground as he had once done to his cost, how nothing throve that year owing to the lowered temperature of the earth.

Clarke had a word to say about the famous Hind Head murder-of his conversation with the barber who met the two murderers at the Devil's Punch Bowl