The shepherdess carried Rosamond home, gave her a warm bath in the tub in which she washed her linen¹, made her some bread-and-milk, and after she had eaten it, put her to bed in Agnes’s crib, where she slept all the rest of that day and all the following night.

 

When at last she opened her eyes, it was to see around her a far poorer cottage than the one she had left—very bare and uncomfortable indeed, she might well have thought; but she had come through such troubles of late, in the way of hunger and weariness and cold and fear, that she was not altogether in her ordinary mood of fault-finding, and so was able to lie enjoying the thought that at length she was safe, and going to be fed and kept warm. The idea of doing any thing in return for shelter and food and clothes, did not, however, even cross her mind.

 

But the shepherdess was one of that plentiful² number who can be wiser concerning other women’s children than concerning their own. Such will often give you very tolerable hints as to how you ought to manage your children, and will find fault neatly³ enough with the system you are trying to carry out; but all their wisdom goes off in talking, and there is none left for doing what they have themselves said. There is one road talk never finds, and that is the way into the talker’s own hands and feet. And such never seem to know themselves—not even when they are reading about themselves in print. Still, not being specially⁴ blinded in any direction but their own, they can sometimes even act with a little sense towards children who are not theirs. They are affected⁵ with a sort of blindness like that which renders some people incapable⁶ of seeing, except sideways.

 

She came up to the bed, looked at the princess, and saw that she was better. But she did not like her much. There was no mark of a princess about her, and never had been since she began to run alone. True, hunger had brought down her fat cheeks, but it had not turned down her

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