"Sally," said Seth Dumbrick, a fortnight afterwards; "I'm beginning to be bothered in my mind."

It was night. Seth was playing "patience" with a very old and very greasy pack of cards. Sally was doing her best to mend her baby's clothes; she was as yet but an indifferent workgirl with the needle. It was not an unpleasant sight to see her taking her stitches, with knitted brow, and pursed-up lips, as though the fate of an empire was in the balance every time she dug her needle in and drew it out again. She had commenced the battle of life very early, but she had put on her armour with great cheerfulness and contentment, and was perhaps at the present moment the happiest little girl in Rosemary Lane. Her baby was asleep on the ground, comfortably covered over.

"I'm beginning to be bothered in my mind," said Seth.

Sally, ready for the bestowal of sympathy, looked up from her work.

"About what?" she asked.

"Many things. That trance of yours, to begin with. It didn't go far enough. Now, I ask you, as a prophetess--do you consider it an out-and-out prophecy?"

The grave air he assumed would have deceived a much riper intellect than Sally's. She prepared to discuss the matter seriously.

"It all come true, Mr. Dumbrick."

"No doubt of that--here you are in proof of it, and there's your father in the hospital, and there's your mother managing the workhouse in the country. It was good enough as far as it went, but it has come to an end already, and there's no more to look forward to. That's what I call not satisfactory."

"No, Mr. Dumbrick?"

"No, Sally Chester. The spirits that came to Joanna when she went off that way beat Pharaoh hollow. He couldn't hold a candle to 'em."

Much distressed by this depreciatory criticism, Sally said:

"It was Pharer's first go, Mr. Dumbrick. Perhaps he wasn't quite up to the business."

For the life of him Seth could not repress a laugh.

"There's something in that, Sally. Practice makes perfect, sure. Now, you couldn't sole and heel a pair o' boots the first time of asking; but you'd manage it in a year or two, with plenty of teaching. But about those spirits of Joanna's; they told all sorts o' things about the future, and they were always at it. And Joanna lived to be an old woman, and to the last day of her life she kept trancing away. Now, you've only had one trance, Sally."

"Yes, Mr. Dumbrick," assented Sally, with a troubled mind, "only one."

"And it doesn't seem likely that you'll have another."

"Yes, it does--yes, it does. I've felt it coming on more than once."

"How does it feel, Sally?" inquired Seth, with an open chuckle.

"A kind o' creepy like, and everything going round."

"That sounds well."

"What is it you want to know, Mr. Dumbrick?"

"Well, there's baby, Sally. She won't be a baby all her life. She'll grow up to be a woman--so will you."

Sally nodded, and listened with all her soul in her ears.

"She has no name except Baby, and it stands to reason that that won't do all along. We must find something else to call her by; it won't be fair to her otherwise, and she wouldn't thank us for it when she grows up. It'd never do to have her grow up ungrateful, and to fly at us for not giving her what everybody else has got."

"Oh! no--never, never! But she'll love us always--you'll see if she won't."

"Don't you set your mind too much on it. Perhaps our baby'll see somebody by-and-by that she'll love better than you or me, and then we shall go to the wall. We're like fiddles, Sally, and Nature's the fiddler, and plays on us."

Open-eyed, and mentally as well as physically wide awake, Sally listened without exactly understanding, but dimly conscious that something very fine was being propounded to her.

"There are not many strings in us, Sally, but, Lord! the number o' tunes that Nature plays on us! And we go through life dancing to 'em, or hobbling to 'em, as the case may be. As this little picture'll do, acc............