Excerpt from The House of Merrilees Thereafter followed years Of work and quiet contentment. The cottage had a shady little garden in front and another behind. Its rooms were very cosy. In the winter evenings, when the two sat together in the parlour, with the lamp on the table, George at his lessons and his mother at her needlework, they might have been far away from the noise and stir Of the great city. Everything was quiet, within and without, and Mrs. Greenfield would put down her work and gaze at the boy, with his curly head bent over his books, absorbed in his preparations for the morrow. Whatever trouble she had undergone in her early days it soon became plain, to her intense thankfulness, that this beautiful child of her heart, with his graceful, chivalrous ways, his clever brain and his balanced orderly outlook on life, would cause her none. There was unbroken love and confidence in the little cottage and a home life of constant companionship, upon which George ever after looked back with the tenderest feelings Of gratitude. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.