CHAPTER I.

E-text prepared by Lionel Sear

CORPORAL SAM AND OTHER STORIES

by

SIR ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH ('Q').

CONTENTS.

CORPORAL SAM.

THE COPERNICAN CONVOY.

RED VELVET.

THE JEW ON THE MOOR.

MY CHRISTMAS BURGLARY.

THE MAYOR'S DOVECOT: A CAUTIONARY TALE.

NEWS FROM TROY!

COLONEL BAIGENT'S CHRISTMAS.

DOCTOR UNONIUS.

MUTUAL EXCHANGE, LIMITED.

CORPORAL SAM.

CHAPTER I.

Sergeant David Wilkes, of the First (Royal) Regiment of Foot--third

battalion, B Company--came trudging with a small fatigue party down

the sandy slopes of Mount Olia, on the summit of which they had been

toiling all day, helping the artillerymen to drag an extra 24-pounder

into battery. They had brought it into position just half an hour

ago, and already it had opened fire along with another 24-pounder and

two howitzers mounted on the same rocky platform. The men as they

descended heard the projectiles fly over their heads, and paused,

distinguishing the scream of the shells from the dull hum of the

round-shot, to watch the effect of the marksmanship, which was

excellent.

Northwards, to their right, stretched the blue line of the Bay, where

a single ship-of-war tacked lazily and kept a two-miles' offing.

The smoke of the guns, drifting down on the land-breeze from the

summit of Mount Olia, now hid her white sails, now lifted and

revealed them in the late afternoon sunshine. But although blue held

the upper heavens--cloudless blue of July--the sunshine that reached

the ship was murky, almost copper-coloured; for it pierced through a

cloud of denser smoke that rolled continuously along the western

horizon from the burning houses of San Sebastian.

Sergeant Wilkes and his men, halting on the lower slope of the

mountain where it fell away in sand-dunes to the estuary of the

Urumea, had the whole flank of the fortress in view. Just now, at

half-tide, it rose straight out of the water on the farther bank--

a low, narrow-necked isthmus that at its seaward end climbed to a

cone-shaped rock four hundred feet high, crowned by a small castle.

This was the citadel. The town, through which alone it could be

taken by force, lay under it, across the neck of the isthmus; and

this again was protected on the landward side by a high rampart or

curtain, strengthened by a tall bastion in its centre and covered by

a regular hornwork pushed out from its front. So much for the

extremities, seaward and landward. That flank of the place which

it presented to the sandhills across the Urumea was clearly more

vulnerable, and yet not easily vulnerable. Deep water and natural

rock protected Mount Orgullo, the citadel hill. The sea-wall, for

almost half its length, formed but a _fausse braye_ for the hornwork

towering formidably behind it. Only where it covered the town, in

the space between citadel and hornwork, this wall became a simple

rampart; stout indeed and solid and twenty-seven feet high, with two

flanking towers for enfilading fire, besides a demi-bastion at the

Mount Orgullo end, yet offering the weak spot in the defences.

The British batteries had found and were hammering at it; not the

guns upon Mount Olia, which had been hauled thither to dominate those

of the citadel, but a dozen 24-pounders disposed, with a line of

mortars behind them, on the lower slope above the estuary, where an

out-cropping ridge of rock gave firm ground among the sand-dunes.

The undulating line of these dunes hid this, the true breaching

battery, from view of Sergeant Wilkes and his men, though they had

halted within a hundred yards of it, and for at least an hour the

guns had been given a rest. Only, at long intervals, one or other of

the mortars threw a bomb to clear the breach--already close upon a

hundred feet wide--driven between the two flanking towers.

It was behind this breach that the town blazed. The smoke, carried

down the estuary by the land-breeze, rolled heavily across the middle

slopes of Mount Orgullo. But above it the small castle stood up

clearly, silhouetted against the western light, and from time to time

one of its guns answered the fire from Mount Olia. Save for this and

the sound of falling timbers in the town, San Sebastian kept silence.

'Wonder what it feels like?'

Sergeant Wilkes, not catching the meaning of this, turned about

slowly. The speaker was a tall young corporal, Sam Vicary by name

and by birth a Somerset lad--a curly haired, broad-shouldered fellow

with a simple engaging smile. He had come out with one of the later

drafts, and nobody knew the cause of his enlisting, but it was

supposed to be some poaching trouble at home. At all events, the

recruiting sergeant had picked up a bargain in him, for, let alone

his stature--and the Royals as a regiment prided themselves on their

inches--he was easily the best marksman in B Company. Sergeant

Wilkes, on whose recommendation he had been given his corporal's

stripe, the day after Vittoria, looked on him as the hopefullest of

his youngsters.

'Feels like?' echoed the sergeant, following the young man's gaze and

observing that it rested on the great breach. 'Oh! 'tis the assault

you mean? Well, it feels pretty much like any other part of the

business, only your blood's up, and you don't have to keep yourself

warm, waiting for the guns to tire. When we stormed the San

Vincenty, now, at Badajoz--'

Some one interrupted, with a serio-comic groan.

'You've started him now, Sam Vicary! Johnny-raws of the Third

Battalion, your kind attention, pray, for Daddy Wilkes and the good

old days when pipeclay _was_ pipeclay. Don't be afraid, for though

he took that first class fortress single-handed, you may sit upon his

knee, and he'll tell you all about it.'

'It's children you are, anyway,' said the sergeant, with a tolerant

smile. 'But I'll forgive ye, when the time comes, if ye'll do the

Royals credit--and, what's more, I'll never cast up that 'twas but a

third battalion against a third-class place. Nor will I need to,' he

added, after a pause, 'if the general makes a throw for yon breach

before clearing the hornwork.'

'I wasn't thinkin' of the assault,' explained the young corporal,

simply, 'but of the women and children. It must be hell for them,

this waitin'.'

The same voice that had mocked the sergeant put up a ribald guffaw.

'Didn't the general give warning,' it asked, 'when he summoned the

garrison? "I've got Sam Vicary here along with me," he said, "and so

I give you notice, for Sam's a terror when he starts to work."'

'If you fellows could quit foolin' a moment--' began Corporal Sam,

with an ingenuous blush. But here on a sudden the slope below them

opened with a roar as the breaching battery--gun after gun--renewed

its fire on the sea-wall. Amid the din, and while the earth shook

underfoot, the sergeant was the first to recover himself.

'Another breach!' he shouted between the explosions, putting up both

hands like a pair of spectacles and peering through the smoke.

'See there--to the left; and that accounts for their quiet this last

hour.' He watched the impact of the shot for a minute or so, and

shook his head. 'They'd do better to clear the horn work.

At Badajoz, now--'

But here he checked himself in time, and fortunately no one had

heard him. The men moved on and struck into the rutted track leading

from the batteries to camp. He turned and followed them in a brown

study. Ever since Badajoz, siege operations had been Sergeant

Wilkes's foible. His youngsters played upon it, drawing him into

discussions over the camp-fire, and winking one to another as he

expounded and illustrated, using bits of stick to represent

parallels, traverses, rampart and glacis, scarp and counterscarp.

But he had mastered something of the theory, after his lights, and

our batteries' neglect of the hornwork struck him as unscientific.

As he pursued the path, a few dozen yards in rear of his comrades, at

a turn where it doubled a sharp corner he saw their hands go up to

the salute, and with this slight warning came upon two of his own

officers--Major Frazer and Captain Archimbeau--perched on a knoll to

the left, and attentively studying the artillery practice through

their glasses. The captain (who, by the way, commanded B Company)

signed to him to halt, and climbed down to him while the fatigue

party trudged on. Major Frazer followed, closing his field telescope

as he descended.

'What do you say to it?' asked Captain Archimbeau, with a jerk of his

hand towards the great breach.

'It can be done, sir,' Sergeant Wilkes answered. 'Leastways, it

ought to be done. But with submission, sir, 'twill be at wicked

waste, unless they first clear the hornwork.'

'They can keep it pretty well swept while we assault. The fact is,'

said Major Frazer, a tall Scotsman, speaking in his slow Scots way,

'we assault it early to-morrow, and the general has asked me to find

volunteers.'

'For the forlorn hope, sir?' The sergeant flushed a little, over the

compliment paid to the Royals.

Major Frazer nodded. 'There's no need to make it common knowledge

just yet. I am allowed to pick my men, but I have no wish to spend

the night in choosing between volunteers. You understand?'

'Yes, sir. You will get a plenty without travelling outside the

regiment.'

'Captain Archimbeau goes with us; and we thought, Wilkes, of asking

you to join the party.'

'You are very good, sir.' There was hesitation, though, in the

sergeant's manner, and Major Frazer perceived it.

'You understand,' he said coldly, 'that there is no obligation.

I wouldn't press a man for this kind of service, even if I could.'

The sergeant flushed. 'I was thinkin' of the regiment, sir,' he

answered, and turned to his captain. 'We shall have our men

supportin'?--if I may make bold to ask.'

'The Royals are to show the way at the great breach, with the 9th in

support. The 38th tackle the smaller breach. To make surer (as he

says), the general has a mind to strengthen us up in the centre with

a picked detachment of the whole division.'

Sergeant Wilkes shook his head. 'I am sorry for that, sir.

'Tisn't for me to teach the general; but I misdoubt all mixin' up of

regiments. What the Royals can do they can best do by themselves.'

'Hurts your pride a bit, eh, sergeant?' asked the major, with a short

laugh. 'And yet, my friend, it was only yesterday I overheard you

telling your company they weren't fit to carry the slops of the Fifth

division.'

'It does 'em good, sir. A man, if he wants to do good, must say a

trifle more than he means, at times.'

'You _can_ trust 'em, then?'

'And that again, sir--savin' your presence--would be sayin' more than

I mean. For the lads, sir, are young lads, though willing enough;

and young lads need to be nursed, however willing. As between you

and me, sir'--here he appealed to Captain Archimbeau--'B Company is

the steadiest in the battalion. But if the major takes away its

captain, and upon top of him its senior sergeant--well, beggin' your

pardon, a compliment's a compliment, but it may be bought too dear.'

'Wilkes is right,' said the major, after a pause. 'To take the both

of you would be risky; and unless I'm mistaken, Archimbeau, he thinks

you will be the easier spared.'

'I haven't a doubt he does,' agreed Captain Archimbeau, laughing.

'But I do not, sir.' The sergeant seemed on the point to say more,

but checked himself.

'Well?'

'It's not for me to give an opinion, sir, unless asked for it.'

'I ask for it, then--your plain opinion, as a soldier.'

'An officer's an officer--that's my opinion. There's good and bad,

to be sure; but an officer like the captain here, that the men can

trust, is harder spared than any sergeant: let alone that you can

easily spread officers too thick--even good ones, and even in a

forlorn hope.'

'He wants my place,' said Captain Archimbeau; 'and he salves my

feelings with a testimonial.'

'As for that, sir'--the sergeant conceded a grin--'I reckon you won't

be far behind us when the trouble begins. And if the major wants a

good man from B Company, you'll agree with me, sir, that yonder he

goes.' And Sergeant Wilkes jerked a thumb after the tall young

corporal, a moment before the sandhills hid his retreating figure.

CHAPTER II.

The assault had been a muddle from the start.

To begin with, after being ordered for one day (July 23rd) it had

been deferred to the next; on reasonable grounds, indeed, for the

town immediately behind the great breach was burning like a furnace;

but it gave the troops an uneasy feeling that their leaders were

distracted in counsel. Nor, divided by the river, did the artillery

and the stormers work upon a mutual understanding. The heavy cannon,

after a short experiment to the left of the great breach, had shifted

their fire to the right of it, and had succeeded in knocking a

practicable hole in it before dusk. But either this change of plan

had not been reported to the trenches, or the officer directing the

assault inexplicably failed to adapt his dispositions to it.

The troops for the great breach were filed out ahead of the 38th,

which had farther to go.

Worst of all, they were set in motion an hour before dawn, although

Wellington had left orders that fair daylight should be waited for,

and the artillery-men across the Urumea were still plying their guns

on the sea-wall, to dissuade the besieged from repairing it in the

darkness. To be sure a signal for the assault--the firing of a mine

against the hornwork--had been concerted, and was duly given; but in

the din and the darkness it was either not heard or not understood.

Thus it happened that the forlorn hope and the supporting companies

of the Royals had no sooner cleared the trenches than their ranks

shook under a fire of grape, and from our own guns. There was no

cure but to dash through it and take the chances, and Major Frazer,

waving his sword, called on his men to follow him at the double.

Ahead of them, along the foot of the sea-wall, the receding tide had

left a strip of strand, foul with rock and rock pools and patches of

seaweed, dark and slippery. Now and again a shell burst and

illuminated these patches, or the still-dripping ooze twinkled under

flashes of musketry from the wall above; for the defenders had

hurried to the parapet and flanking towers, and their fire already

crackled the whole length of the strand.

Sergeant Wilkes, running a pace or two behind the major, slipping and

staggering at every second yard, was aware--though he could not see

him--of young Corporal Sam close at his shoulder. The lad talked to

himself as he ran: but his talk was no more than a babble of quiet

unmeaning curses, and the sergeant, who understood how the lust of

fighting works in different men, did not trouble to answer until,

himself floundering up to his knees in a saltwater pool, he flung out

a hand for support and felt it gripped.

'Damn them!' The corporal, dragging him to solid foothold, cast a

look up as a shell burst high overhead, and his face showed white

with passion in the glare of it. 'Can't any one _tell_ them there's

no sense in it!'

'Take it easy, lad,' panted the sergeant, cheerfully. 'They're bound

to understand in a minute, hearin' all this musketry. Accidents will

happen--and anyway they can't help seein' us at the breach. Look at

the light of it beyond the tower there!'

They floundered on together. The tower, not fifty yards away, jetted

fire from every loophole; but its marksmen were aiming into the

darkness, having been caught in a hurry and before they could throw

down flares. As the sergeant rushed to get close under the wall of

it, a bullet sent his shako whizzing; but still he ran on, and came

bareheaded to the foot of the breach.

It ran down to the foreshore, a broadening scree of rubble, ruined

masonry, broken beams of timber--some of them smouldering; and over

the top of it shone the blaze of the town. But the actual gap

appeared to be undefended, and, better still, the rubbish on the near

side had so piled itself that for half the way up the stormers could

climb under cover, protected from the enfilading fire. Already the

major had dropped on hands and knees and was leading the way up,

scrambling from heap to heap of rubbish. Close after him went an

officer in the uniform of the Engineers, with Corporal Sam at his

heels. The sergeant ducked his head and followed, dodging from block

to block of masonry on the other side of which the bullets spattered.

'Forward! Forward the Royals!'

The leaders were shouting it, and he passed on the shout. As yet,

not a man had fallen on the slope of the breach. Two, more agile

than he because by some years younger, overtook and passed him; but

he was the sixth to reach the summit, and might reckon this very good

work for a man of his weight. Then, as he turned to shout again,

three more of the forlorn hope came blundering up, and the nine stood

unscathed on the summit of the gap and apparently with none to oppose

them.

But beyond it--between them and the town, and a sheer twenty feet

below them, lay a pool of blazing tar, the flames of which roared up

against their faces.

'Forward the Royals! Ladders--ladders! Oh, for your life, forward

with the ladders!'

The major started the cry. Corporal Sam, taking it up, screamed

it again and again. In the darkness, behind and below, the

sergeant heard Captain Archimbeau calling to his men to hurry.

One ladder-bearer came clattering up; but the ladders were in

six-foot lengths, and a single length was useless. Nevertheless, in

his rage of haste, Corporal Sam seized it from the man, and was

bending to clamp it over the pit, when from the parapet to the right

a sudden cross-fire swept the head of the breach. A bullet struck

him in the hand. He looked up, with the pain of it, in time to see

Major Frazer spin about, topple past the sergeant's hand thrust out

to steady him, and pitch headlong down the slope. The ladder-bearer

and another tall Royal dropped at the same moment.

'Hi, sergeant!' spoke up the young Engineer officer very sharply and

clearly, at the same time stepping a couple of paces down from the

ridge over which a frontal fire of bullets now flew whistling from

the loopholed houses in the town. 'For God's sake, shout and hurry

up your men, or our chance this night is gone.'

'I know it, sir--I know it,' groaned Wilkes.

'Then shout, man! Fifty men might do it yet, but every moment is odds

against. See the swarm on the rampart there, to the right!'

They shouted together, but in vain. Four or five ladder-bearers

mounted the slope, but only to be shot down almost at their feet.

The Engineer officer, reaching forward to seize one of the

ladder-lengths and drag it behind a pile of masonry under which he

had taken cover, and thus for an instant exposing himself, dropped

suddenly upon his face. And now but Sergeant Wilkes and Corporal Sam

were left clinging, waiting for the help that still tarried.

What had happened was this. The supporting columns, disordered by

the scramble along the foreshore, arrived at the foot of the breach

in straggling twos and threes; and here, while their officers tried

to form them up, the young soldiers behind, left for the moment

without commanders and exasperated by the fire from the flanking

tower, halted to exchange useless shots with its defenders and with

the enemy on the rampart. Such fighting was worse than idle: it

delayed them full in the path of the 38th, which now overtook them on

its way to the lesser breach, and in five minutes the two columns

were inextricably mixed, blocking the narrow space between wall and

river, and exposed in all this dark confusion to a murderous fire.

At length, and though less than a third of his men followed him,

Captain Archimbeau led the supporters up the breach; but by this time

the enemy had packed the ramparts on either side. No soldiery could

stand the hail of musketry, grape, and hand-grenades that rained upon

the head of the column. It hesitated, pushed forward again, and

broke some fifteen feet from the summit, like a spent wave. Then, as

the Royals came pouring back, Lieutenant Campbell of the 9th, with

all that could be collected of his picked detachment, forced his way

up through the sheer weight of them, won clear, and made a fling for

the crest. In vain! His first rush carried him abreast of the

masonry under which Sergeant Wilkes and the corporal clung for cover.

They rushed out to join him; but they had scarcely gained his side

before the whole detachment began to give ground. It was not that

the men fell back; rather, the apex of the column withered down as

man after man dropped beside its leader. He himself had taken a

wound. Yet he waved his sword and carried them forward on a second

charge, only to reach where he had reached before, and be laid there

by a second bullet.

Meanwhile the Royals, driven to the foot of the slope, were flung as

a fresh obstacle in the path of the 38th still striving to press on

for the lesser breach. From his perch half-way up the ruins,

Sergeant Wilkes descried Captain Archimbeau endeavouring to rally

them, and climbed down to help him. The corporal followed, nursing

his wounded hand. As they reached him a bugle sounded the recall.

The assault had failed. At the foot of the breach a soldier of the

4th Regiment, mad with rage, foamed out a curse upon the Royals.

Corporal Sam lifted his bleeding fist and struck him across the

mouth. The sergeant dragged the two apart, slipped an arm under his

comrade's, and led him away as one leads a child. A moment later the

surge of the retreating crowd had almost carried them off their feet.

But the sergeant kept a tight hold, and steered his friend back every

yard of the way along the bullet-swept foreshore. They were less

than half-way across when the dawn broke; and looking in his face he

saw that the lad was crying silently--the powder-grime on his cheeks

streaked and channelled with tears.

CHAPTER III.

'I don't understand ye, lad,' said Sergeant Wilkes.

'Fast enough you'd understand, if you'd but look me in the face,'

answered Corporal Sam, digging his heel into the sand.

The two men lay supine on a cushion of coarse grass; the sergeant

smoking and staring up at the sky, the corporal, with his sound hand

clasping his wounded one behind his head, his gaze fixed gloomily

between his knees and across the dunes, on the still unrepaired

breach in San Sebastian.

A whole fortnight had dragged by since the assault: a fortnight of

idleness for the troops, embittered almost intolerably by a sense

that the Fifth Division had disgraced itself. One regiment blamed

another, and all conspired to curse the artillery--whose practice, by

the way, had been brilliant throughout the siege. Nor did the

gunners fail to retort; but they were in luckier case, being kept

busy all the while, first in shifting their batteries and removing

their worst guns to the ships, next in hauling and placing the new

train that arrived piecemeal from England; and not only busy, but

alert, on the watch against sorties. Also, and although the error of

cannonading the columns of assault had never been cleared up, the

brunt of Wellington's displeasure had fallen on the stormers.

The Marquis ever laid stress on his infantry, whether to use them or

blame them; and when he found occasion to blame, he had words--and

methods--that scarified equally the general of division and the

private soldier.

'Fast enough you understand,' repeated Corporal Sam savagely.

'I do, then, and I don't,' admitted Sergeant Wilkes, after a pause.

The lad puzzled him; gave him few confidences, asked for none at all,

and certainly was no cheerful companion; and yet during these days of

humiliation the two had become friends, almost inseparable.

'I've read it,' the sergeant pursued, 'in Scripture or somewhere,

that a man what keeps a hold on himself does better than if he took a

city. I don't say as I understand that altogether; but it _sounds_

right.'

'Plucky lot of cities we take, in the Royals,' growled Corporal Sam.

He nodded, as well as his posture allowed, towards San Sebastian.

'And you call that a third-class fortress!'

'Accidents will happen.' Sergeant Wilkes, puffing at his pipe, fell

back philosophically on his old catchword. 'It takes you hard,

because you're young; and it takes you harder because you had fed

yourself up on dreams o' glory, and such-like.'

'Well?'

'Well, and you have to get over it, that's all. A man can't properly

call himself a soldier till he's learnt to get over it.'

'If that's all, the battalion is qualifyin' fast!' Corporal Sam

retorted bitterly, and sat up, blinking in the strong sunlight.

Then, as Sergeant Wilkes made no reply, or perhaps because he guessed

something in Sergeant Wilkes's averted face, a sudden compunction

seized him. 'You feel it too?'

'I got to, after all my trouble,' answered Sergeant Wilkes brusquely.

'I'm sorry. Look here--I wish you'd turn your face about--it's worse

for you and yet you get over it, as you say. How the devil do you

manage?'

Still for a while Sergeant Wilkes leaned back without making reply.

But of a sudden he, too, sat upright, drew down the peak of his shako

to shade his eyes, and drawing his pipe from his mouth, jerked the

stem of it to indicate a figure slowly crossing a rise of the

sandhills between them and the estuary.

'You see that man?'

'To be sure I do. An officer, and in the R.A.--curse them!--though I

can't call to mind the cut of his jib.'

'You wouldn't. His name's Ramsay, and he's just out of arrest.'

'What has he done?'

'A many things, first and last. At Fuentes d'Onoro the whole French

cavalry cut him off--him and his battery--and he charged back clean

through them; ay, lad, through 'em like a swathe, with his horses

belly-down and the guns behind 'em bounding like skipjacks; not a gun

taken, and scarce a gunner hurt. That's the sort of man.'

'Why has he been under arrest?'

'Because the Marquis gave him an order and forgot it. And because

coming up later, expecting to find him where he wasn't and had no

right to be, the Marquis lost his temper. And likewise, because,

when a great man loses his temper, right or wrong don't matter much.

So there goes Captain Ramsay broken; a gentleman and a born fighter;

and a captain he'll die. That's how the mills grind in this here

all-conquering army. And the likes of us sit here and complain.'

'If a man did that wrong to me--' Corporal Sam jumped to his feet and

stared after the slight figure moving alone across the sandhills.

Had his curiosity led him but a few paces farther, he had seen a

strange sight indeed.

Captain Norman Ramsay, wandering alone and with a burning heart,

halted suddenly on the edge of a sand-pit. Below him four men stood,

gathered in a knot--two of them artillery officers, the others

officers of the line. His first impulse was to turn and escape, for

he shunned all companionship just now. But a second glance told him

what was happening; and, prompt on the understanding, he plunged

straight down the sandy bank, walked up to a young artillery officer

and took the pistol out of his hand. That was all, and it all

happened in less than three minutes. The would-be duellist--and

challenges had been common since the late assault--knew the man and

his story. For that matter, every one in the army knew his story.

As a ghost he awed them. For a moment he stood looking from one to

the other, and so, drawing the charge, tossed the pistol back at its

owner's feet and resumed his way.

Corporal Sam, who had merely seen the slight figure pass beyond the

edge of the dunes, went back and flung himself again on the warm

bank.

'If a man did that wrong to me--' he repeated.

CHAPTER IV.

Certainly, just or unjust, the Marquis could make himself infernally

unpleasant. Having ridden over from head-quarters and settled the

plans for the new assault, he returned to his main army and there

demanded fifty volunteers from each of the fifteen regiments

composing the First, Fourth, and Light Divisions--men (as he put it)

_who could show other troops how to mount a breach_. It may be

guessed with what stomach the Fifth Division digested this; and among

them not a man was angrier than their old general, Leith, who now,

after a luckless absence, resumed command. The Fifth Division, he

swore, could hold their own with any soldiers in the Peninsula.

He was furious with the seven hundred and fifty volunteers, and,

evading the Marquis's order, which was implicit rather than direct,

he added an oath that these interlopers should never lead his men to

the breaches.

Rage begets rage. During the misty morning hours of August 31st, the

day fixed for the assault, these volunteers, held back and chafing

with the reserves, could scarcely be restrained from breaking out of

the trenches. 'Why,' they demanded, 'had they been fetched here if

not to show the way?'--a question for which their officers were in no

mood to provide a soft answer.

Yet their turn came. Sergeant Wilkes, that amateur in

siege-operations, had rightly prophesied from the first that the

waste of life at the breaches would be wicked and useless until the

hornwork had been silenced and some lodgment made there. So as the

morning wore on, and the sea-mists gave place to burning sunshine,

and this again to heavy thunder-clouds collected by the unceasing

cannonade, still more and more of the reserves of the Fifth Division

were pushed up, until none but the volunteers and a handful of the

9th Regiment remained in the trenches. Them, too, at length Leith

was forced to unleash, and they swept forward on the breaches yelling

like a pack of hounds; but on the crest-line they fared at first no

better than the regiments they had taunted. Thrice and four times

they reached it only to topple back. The general, watching the fight

from the batteries across the Urumea, now directed the gunners to

fire over the stormers' heads; and again a cry went up that our men

were being slaughtered by their own artillery. Undismayed by this,

with no recollections of the first assault to daunt them, a company

of the Light Division took advantage of the fire to force their way

over the rampart on the right of the great breach and seize a

lodgment in some ruined houses actually within the town. There for

an hour or so these brave men were cut off, for the assault in

general made no headway.

It must have failed, even after five hours' fighting, but for an

accident. A line of powder-barrels collected behind the traverses by

the great breach took fire and blew up, driving back all the French

grenadiers but the nearest, whom it scattered in mangled heaps.

As explosion followed explosion, the bright flame spread and ran

along the high curtain. The British leapt after it, breaking through

the traverse and swarming up to the curtain's summit. Almost at the

same moment the Thirteenth and Twenty-fourth Portuguese, who had

crossed the river by a lower ford, hurled themselves over the lesser

breach to the right; and as the swollen heavens burst in a storm of

rain and thunder, from this point and that the besiegers, as over the

lip of a dam, swept down into the streets.

'Treat men like dogs, and they'll behave like dogs,' grumbled

Sergeant Wilkes, as he followed to prevent what mischief he might.

But this, he well knew, would be little enough.

CHAPTER V.

Corporal Sam Vicary, coming up to the edge of the camp-fire's light,

stood there for a moment with a white face. The cause of it--though

it would have been a sufficient one--was not the story to which the

men around the fire had been listening; for the teller, at sight of

the corporal, had broken off abruptly, knowing him to be a religious

fellow after a fashion, with a capacity for disapproval and a pair of

fists to back it up. So, while his comrades guffawed, he rather

cleverly changed the subject.

'Oh, and by the way, talkin' of the convent'--he meant the Convent of

Santa Teresa, a high building under the very slope of the citadel,

protected by its guns and still held by the enemy, after three days'

fighting--'do any of you know a small house to the left of it, with

only a strip of garden between? Sort of a mud-nest it is, like a

swallow's, stuck under overhang o' the cliff. No? Well, that's a

pity, for I hear tell the general has promised five pounds to the

first man who breaks into that house.'

'But why, at all?' inquired a man close on his right.

'I know the place,' put in another; 'a mean kind of building, with

one window lookin' down the street, and that on the second floor, as

you might say. It don't look to me the sort of house to hold five

pounds' worth, all told--let be that, to force it, a man must cross

half the fire from the convent, and in full view. Five pounds be

_damned!_ Five pounds isn't so scarce in these times that a man need

go there to fetch it for his widow.'

The corporal was turning away. For three days San Sebastian had been

a hell, between the flames of which he had seen things that sickened

his soul. They sickened it yet, only in remembrance. Yes, and the

sickness had more than once come nigh to be physical. His throat

worked at the talk of loot, now that he knew what men did for it.

'The general ain't after the furnitcher,' answered the first speaker.

'It consarns a child.'

'A child ain't no such rarity in San Sebastian that anybody need

offer five pounds for one.'

'What's this talk about a child?' asked Sergeant Wilkes, coming in

from his rounds, and dropping to a seat by the blaze. He caught

sight of Corporal Sam standing a little way back, and nodded.

'Well, it seems that, barring this child, every soul in the house has

been killed. The place is pretty certain death to approach, and the

crittur, for all that's known, has been left without food for two

days and more. 'Tis a boy, I'm told--a small thing, not above four

at the most. Between whiles it runs to the window and looks out.

The sentries have seen it more'n a dozen times; and one told me he'd

a sight sooner look on a ghost.'

'Then why don't the Frenchies help?' some one demanded. 'There's a

plenty of 'em close by, in the convent.'

'The convent don't count. There's a garden between it and the

house, and on the convent side a blank wall--no windows at all, only

loopholes. Besides which, there's a whole block of buildings in full

blaze t'other side of the house, and the smoke of it drives across so

that 'tis only between whiles you can see the child at all. The odds

are, he'll be burnt alive or smothered before he starves outright;

and, I reckon, put one against the other, 'twill be the mercifuller

end.'

'Poor little beggar,' said the sergeant. 'But why don't the general

send in a white flag, and take him off?'

'A lot the governor would believe--and after what you and me have

seen these two days! A nice tenderhearted crew to tell him,

"If you please, we've come for a poor little three-year-old."

Why, he'd as lief as not believe we meant to _eat_ him.'

Sergeant Wilkes glanced up across the camp-fire to the spot where

Corporal Sam had been standing. But Corporal Sam had disappeared.

CHAPTER VI.

Although the hour was close upon midnight, and no moon showed,

Corporal Sam needed no lantern to light him through San Sebastian;

for a great part of the upper town still burned fiercely, and from

time to time a shell, soaring aloft from the mortar batteries across

the river, burst over the citadel or against the rocks where the

French yet clung, and each explosion flung a glare across the

heavens.

He had passed into the town unchallenged. The fatigue parties,

hunting by twos and threes among the ruins of the river-front for

corpses to burn or bury, doubtless supposed him to be about the same

business. At any rate, they paid him no attention.

Just within the walls, where the conflagration had burnt itself out,

there were patches of black shadow to be crossed carefully.

The fighting had been obstinate here, and more than one blazing house

had collapsed into the thick of it. The corporal picked his way

gingerly, shivering a little at the thought of some things buried, or

half-buried, among the loose stones. Indeed, at the head of the

first street his foot entangled itself in something soft. It turned

out to be nothing more than a man's cloak, or _poncho_, and he

slipped it on, to hide his uniform and avoid explanations should he

fall in with one of the patrols; but the feel of it gave him a scare

for a moment.

The lad, in fact, was sick of fighting and slaughter--physically ill

at the remembrance and thought of them. The rage of the assault had

burnt its way through him like a fever and left him weak, giddy,

queasy of stomach. He had always hated the sight of suffering, even

the suffering of dumb animals: and as a sportsman, home in England,

he had learnt to kill his game clean, were it beast or bird.

In thought, he had always loathed the trade of a butcher, and had

certainly never guessed that soldiering could be--as here in San

Sebastian he had seen it--more bestial than the shambles.

For some reason, as he picked his road, his mind wandered away from

the reek and stink of San Sebastian and back to England, back to

Somerset, to the slopes of Mendip. His home there had overlooked an

ancient battle-field, and as a boy, tending the sheep on the uplands,

he had conned it often and curiously, having heard the old men tell

tales of it. The battle had been fought on a wide plain intersected

by many water-dykes. Twice or thrice he had taken a holiday to

explore it, half expecting that a close view would tell him something

of its history; but, having no books to help him, he had brought back

very little beyond a sense of awe that so tremendous a thing had

happened just there, and (unconsciously) a stored remembrance of the

scents blown across the level from the flowers that lined the dykes--

scents of mint and meadow-sweet at home there, as the hawthorn was at

home on the hills above.

He smelt them now, across the reek of San Sebastian, and they wafted

him back to England--to boyhood, dreaming of war but innocent of its

crimes--to long thoughts, long summer days spent among the unheeding

sheep, his dog Rover beside him--an almost thoroughbred collie, and a

good dog, too, though his end had been tragic. . . . But why on earth

should his thoughts be running on Rover just now?

Yet, and although, as he went, England was nearer to him and more

real than the smoking heaps between which he picked his way, he

steered all the while towards the upper town, through the square, and

up the hill overlooked by the convent and the rocky base of the

citadel. He knew the exact position of the house, and he chose a

narrow street--uninhabited now, and devastated by fire--that led

directly to it.

The house was untouched by fire as yet, though another to the left of

it blazed furiously. It clung, as it were a swallow's nest, to the

face of the cliff. A garden wall ran under the front; and, parallel

with the wall, a road pretty constantly swept by musketry fire from

the convent. At the head of the street Corporal Sam stumbled against

a rifleman who, sheltered from bullets at the angle of the crossing,

stood calmly watching the conflagration.

'Hallo!' said the rifleman cheerfully; 'I wanted some more audience,

and you're just in time.'

'There's a child in the house, eh?' panted Corporal Sam, who had come

up the street at a run.

The rifleman nodded. 'Poor little devil! He'll soon be out of his

pain, though.'

'Why, there's heaps of time! The fire won't take hold for another

half-hour. What's the best way in? . . . You an' me can go shares,

if that's what you're hangin' back for,' added Corporal Sam, seeing

that the man eyed him without stirring.

'Hi! Bill!' the rifleman whistled to a comrade, who came slouching

out of a doorway close by, with a clock in one hand, and in the other

a lantern by help of which he had been examining the inside of this

piece of plunder. 'Here's a boiled lobster in a old woman's cloak,

wants to teach us the way into the house yonder.'

'Tell him to go home,' said Bill, still peering into the works of the

clock. 'Tell him we've _been_ there.' He chuckled a moment, looked

up, and addressed himself to Corporal Sam. 'What regiment?'

'The Royals.'

The two burst out laughing scornfully. 'Don't wonder you cover it

up,' said the first rifleman.

Corporal Sam pulled off his _poncho_. 'I'd offer to fight the both

of you,' he said, 'but 'tis time wasted with a couple of white-livers

that don't dare fetch a poor child across a roadway. Let me go by;

_you_'ll keep, anyway.'

'Now look here, sonny--' The first rifleman blocked his road.

'I don't bear no malice for a word spoken in anger: so stand quiet

and take my advice. That house isn't goin' to take fire. 'Cos why?

'Cos as Bill says, we've _been_ there--there and in the next house,

now burnin'--and we know. 'Cos before leavin'--the night before last

it was--some of our boys set two barrels o' powder somewheres in the

next house, on the ground floor, _with_ a slow match. That's why

_we_ left; though, as it happened, the match missed fire. But the

powder's there, and if you'll wait a few minutes now you'll not be

disapp'inted.'

'You left the child behind!'

'Well, we left in a hurry, as I tell you, and somehow in the hurry

nobody brought him along. I'm sorry for the poor little devil, too.'

The fellow swung about. 'See him there at the window, now! If you

want him put out of his pain--'

He lifted his rifle. Corporal Sam made a clutch at his arm to drag

it down, and in the scuffle both men swayed out upon the roadway.

And with that, or a moment later, he felt the rifleman slip down

between his arms, and saw the blood gush from his mouth as he

collapsed on the cobbles.

Corporal Sam heard the man Bill shout a furious oath, cast one

puzzled look up the roadway towards the convent, saw the flashes

jetting from its high wall, and raced across unscathed. A bullet

sang past his ear as he found the gate and hurled himself into the

garden. It was almost dark here, but dark only for a moment. . . .

For as he caught sight of a flight of steps leading to a narrow

doorway, and ran for them--and even as he set foot on the lowest--of

a sudden the earth heaved under him, seemed to catch him up in a

sheet of flame, and flung him backwards--backwards and flat on his

back, into a clump of laurels.

Slowly he picked himself up. The sky was dark now; but, marvellous

to say, the house stood. The mass of it yet loomed over the laurels.

Yes, and a light showed under the door at the head of the steps.

He groped his way up and pushed the door open.

The light came through a rent in the opposite wall, and on the edge

of this jagged hole some thin laths were just bursting into a blaze.

He rushed across the room to beat out the flame, and this was easily

done; but, as he did it, he caught sight of a woman's body, stretched

along the floor by the fireplace, and of a child cowering in the

corner, watching him.

'Come and help, little one,' said Corporal Sam, still beating at the

laths.

The child understood no English, and moreover was too small to help.

But it seemed that the corporal's voice emboldened him, for he drew

near and stood watching.

'Who did _this_, little one?' asked Corporal Sam, nodding towards the

corpse, as he rubbed the charred dust from his hands.

For a while the child stared at him, not comprehending; but by-and-by

pointed beneath the table and then back at its mother.

The corporal walked to the table, stooped, and drew from under it a

rifle and a pouch half-filled with cartridges.

'Tell him we've _been_ there.' He seemed to hear the rifleman Bill's

voice repeating the words, close at hand. He recognised the badge on

the pouch.

He was shaking where he stood; and this, perhaps, was why the child

stared at him so oddly. But, looking into the wondering young eyes,

he read only the question, 'What are you going to do?'

He hated these riflemen. Nay, looking around the room, how he hated

all the foul forces that had made this room what it was! . . .

And yet, on the edge of resolve, he knew that he must die for what he

meant to do . . . that the thing was unpardonable, that in the end he

must be shot down, and rightly, as a dog.

He remembered his dog Rover, how the poor brute had been tempted to

sheep-killing at night, on the sly; and the look in his eyes when,

detected at length, he had crawled forward to his master to be shot.

No other sentence was possible, and Rover had known it.

Had he no better excuse? Perhaps not. . . . He only knew that he

could not help it; that this thing had been done, and by the consent

of many . . . and that as a man he must kill for it, though as a

soldier he deserved only to be killed.

With the child's eyes still resting on him in wonder, he set the

rifle on its butt and rammed down a cartridge; and so, dropping on

hands and knees, crept to the window.

CHAPTER VII.

Early next morning Sergeant Wilkes picked his way across the ruins of

the great breach and into the town, keeping well to windward of the

fatigue parties already kindling fires and collecting the dead bodies

that remained unburied.

Within and along the sea-wall San Sebastian was a heap of burnt-out

ruins. Amid the stones and rubble encumbering the streets, lay

broken muskets, wrenched doors, shattered sticks of furniture--

mirrors, hangings, women's apparel, children's clothes--loot dropped

by the pillagers as valueless, wreckage of the flood. He passed a

very few inhabitants, and these said nothing to him; indeed, did not

appear to see him, but sat by the ruins of their houses with faces

set in a stupid horror. Even the crash of a falling house near by

would scarcely persuade them to stir, and hundreds during the last

three days had been overwhelmed thus and buried.

The sergeant had grown callous to these sights. He walked on,

heeding scarcely more than he was heeded, came to the great square,

and climbed a street leading northwards, a little to the left of the

great convent. The street was a narrow one, for half its length

lined on both sides with fire-gutted houses; but the upper half,

though deserted, appeared to be almost intact. At the very head, and

close under the citadel walls, it took a sharp twist to the right,

and another twist, almost equally sharp, to the left before it ended

in a broader thoroughfare, crossing it at right angles and running

parallel with the ramparts.

At the second twist the sergeant came to a halt; for at his feet,

stretched across the causeway, lay a dead body.

He drew back with a start, and looked about him. Corporal Sam had

been missing since nine o'clock last night, and he felt sure that

Corporal Sam must be here or hereabouts. But no living soul was in

sight.

The body at his feet was that of a rifleman; one of the volunteers

whose presence had been so unwelcome to General Leith and the whole

Fifth Division. The dead fist clutched its rifle; and the sergeant

stooping to disengage this, felt that the body was warm.

'Come back, you silly fool!'

He turned quickly. Another rifleman had thrust his head out of a

doorway close by. The sergeant, snatching up the weapon, sprang and

joined him in the passage where he sheltered.

'I--I was looking for a friend hereabouts.'

'Fat lot of friend you'll find at the head of _this_ street!' snarled

the rifleman, and jerked his thumb towards the corpse. 'That makes

the third already this morning. These Johnnies ain't no sense of

honour left--firing on outposts as you may call it.'

'Where are they firing from?'

'No "they" about it. You saw that cottage--or didn't you?--right

above there, under the wall; the place with one window in it?

There's a devil behind it somewheres; he fires from the back of the

room, and what's more, he never misses his man. You have Nick's own

luck--the pretty target you made, too; that is unless, like some that

call themselves Englishmen and ought to know better, he's a special

spite on the Rifles.'

The sergeant paid no heed to the sneer. He was beginning to think.

'How long has this been going on?' he asked.

'Only since daylight. There was a child up yonder, last night; but

it stands to reason a child can't be doing this. He never misses, I

tell you. Oh, you had luck, just now!'

'I wonder,' said Sergeant Wilkes, musing. 'I'll try it again,

anyway.' And while the rifleman gasped he stepped out boldly into

the road.

He knew that his guess might, likely enough, be wrong: that, even

were it right, the next two seconds might see him a dead man.

Yet he was bound to satisfy himself. With his eyes on the sinister

window--it stood half open and faced straight down the narrow

street--he knelt by the corpse, found its ammunition pouch, unbuckled

the strap and drew out a handful of cartridges. Then he straightened

himself steadily--but his heart was beating hard--and as steadily

walked back and rejoined the rifleman in the passage.

'You have a nerve,' said the rifleman, his voice shaking a little.

'Looks like he don't fire on redcoats; but you have a nerve all the

same.'

'Or else he may be gone,' suggested the sergeant, and on the instant

corrected himself; 'but I warn you not to reckon upon that. Is there

a window facing on him anywhere, round the bend of the street?'

'I dunno.'

The rifleman peered forth, turning his head sideways for a cautious

reconnoitre. 'Maybe he _has_ gone, after all--'

It was but his head he exposed beyond the angle of the doorway; and

yet, on the instant a report cracked out sharply, and he pitched

forward into the causeway. His own rifle clattered on the stones

beside him, and where he fell he lay, like a stone.

Sergeant Wilkes turned with a set jaw and mounted the stairs of the

deserted house behind him. They led him up to the roof, and there he

dropped on his belly and crawled. Across three roofs he crawled, and

lay down behind a balustrade overlooking the transverse roadway.

Between the pillars of the balustrade he looked right across the

roadway and into the half-open window of the cottage. The room

within was dark save for the glimmer of a mirror on the back wall.

'Kill him I must,' growled the sergeant through his teeth, 'though I

wait the day for it.'

And he waited there, crouching for an hour--for two hours.

He was shifting his cramped attitude a little--a very little--for

about the twentieth time, when a smur of colour showed on the mirror,

and the next instant passed into a dark shadow. It may be that the

marksman within the cottage had spied yet another rifleman in the

street. But the sergeant had noted the reflection in the glass, that

it was red. Two shots rang out together. But the sergeant, after

peering through the parapet, stood upright, walked back across the

roofs, and regained the stairway.

The street was empty. From one of the doorways a voice called to him

to come back. But he walked on, up the street and across the roadway

to a green-painted wicket. It opened upon a garden, and across the

garden he came to a flight of steps with an open door above. Through

this, too, he passed and stared into a small room. On the far side

of it, in an armchair, sat Corporal Sam, leaning back, with a hand to

his breast; and facing him, with a face full of innocent wonder,

stood a child--a small, grave, curly-headed child.

CHAPTER VIII.

'I'm glad you done it quick,' said Corporal Sam.

His voice was weak, yet he managed to get out the words firmly,

leaning back in the wooden armchair, with one hand on his left

breast, spread and covering the lower ribs.

The sergeant did not answer at once. Between the spread fingers he

saw a thin stream welling, darker than the scarlet tunic which it

discoloured. For perhaps three seconds he watched it. To him the

time seemed as many minutes, and all the while he was aware of the

rifle-barrel warm in his grasp.

'Because,' Corporal Sam pursued with a smile that wavered a little,

half wistfully seeking his eyes, 'you'd 'a had to do it, anyway--

wouldn't you? And any other way it--might--'a been hard.'

'Lad, what _made_ you?'

It was all Sergeant Wilkes could say, and he said it, wondering at

the sound of his own voice. The child, who, seeing that the two were

friends and not, after all, disposed to murder one another, had

wandered to the head of the stairs to look down into the sunlit

garden shining below, seemed to guess that something was amiss after

all, and, wandering back, stood at a little distance, finger to lip.

'I don't know,' the corporal answered, like a man with difficulty

trying to collect his thoughts. 'Leastways, not to explain to you.

It must 'a been comin' on for some time.'

'But _what_, lad--_what?_'

'Ah--"what?" says you. That's the trouble, and I can't never make

you _see_--yes, make you _see_--the hell of it. It began with

thinkin'--just with thinkin'--_that first night you led me home from

the breach_. And the things I saw and heard; and then, when I came

here, only meanin' to save _him_--'

He broke off and nodded at the child, who catching his eye, nodded

back smiling.

He and the corporal had evidently made great friends.

But the corporal's gaze, wavering past him, had fixed itself on a

trestle bed in the corner.

'There was a woman,' he said. 'She was stone cold; but the child

told me--until I stopped his mouth, and made a guess at the rest.

I took her down and buried her in the garden. And with that it came

over me that the whole of it--the whole business--was wrong, and that

to put myself right I must kill, and keep on killing. Of course I

knew what the end would be. But I never looked for such luck as

_your_ coming. . . . I was ashamed, first along, catching sight o'

you--not--not ashamed, only I didn't want you to see. But when you

took cover an' waited--though I wouldn't 'a hurt you for worlds--why

then I knew how the end would be.'

'Lad,' said the sergeant, watching him as he panted, 'I don't

understand you, except that you're desperate wrong. But I saw you--

saw you by the lookin'-glass, behind there; and 'tis right you should

know.'

'O' course you saw me. . . . I'm not blamin', am I? You had to do

it, and I had to take it. That was the easiest way. I couldn' do no

other, an' you couldn' do no other, that bein' your duty. An' the

child, there--'

Sergeant Wilkes turned for a moment to the child, who met his gaze,

round-eyed; then to his friend again.

But the corporal's head had dropped forward on his chest.

The sergeant touched his shoulder, to make sure; then, with one look

behind him, but ignoring the child, reeled out of the room and down

the stairs, as in a dream. In the sunny garden the fresh air revived

him and he paused to stare at a rose-bush, rampant, covered with

white blossoms against which the bees were humming. Their hum ran in

his head so that he failed to notice that the sound of musketry had

died down. An hour before it had been death to walk, as he did,

under the convent wall and out into the street leading to the lesser

breach. The convent had, in fact, surrendered, and its defenders

were even now withdrawing up the hill to the citadel. He found the

lesser breach and climbed down it to the shore of the Urumea, beside

the deserted ford across which the Portuguese had waded on the

morning of the second assault. Beyond it shone the sandhills,

hiding our batteries.

He sat down on the bank and pulled off boots and socks, preparing to

wade; but turned at a slight sound.

The child had followed him and stood half-way down the ruins of the

breach, wistful, uncertain.

In a rage, as one threatens off an importunate dog, Sergeant Wilkes

waved an arm. The child turned and slunk away, back into San

Sebastian.

THE COPERNICAN CONVOY.

[The story is told by Will Fleming, of the Inner Temple,

Barrister-at-law, and sometime Cornet of the 32nd Troop of Horse in

the Parliament Army, then (December, 1643) quartered at Farnham, on

the Hants border.]

CHAPTER I.

I dare say that, since the world began and men learned to fight, was

never an army moderately prosperous and yet fuller of grumblers than

was ours during the latter weeks of November and the first fortnight

of December, 1643. In part the blame lay upon our general, Sir

William Waller, and his fondness for night attacks and beating up of

quarters. He rested neither himself nor his men, but spent them

without caring, and drove not a few to desert in mere fatigue.

This was his way, and it differed from the way of my Lord Essex, who

rather spilled his strength by lethargy and grieved over it.

'Twas notorious these two generals loved not one another: and 'tis

not for me, who never served under Essex, to take sides. But I will

say this for General Waller--that he spared himself as little as any

common soldier; never forgot the face of a good servant; and in

general fed his men well and hated arrears of pay like the devil.

Nevertheless, and hate it though he might, our pay was in arrears.

Moreover, apart from their fatigue of marching and counter-marching,

the bulk of our infantry had been drawn from the London train-bands--

the Red Westminster Regiment and the Auxiliaries, Green and Yellow,

of London City and the Tower Hamlets; tradesmen, that is to say, who

wearied to be home again with their wives and families after six

months' separation, and others (such as the White Regiment of

Auxiliaries) freshly drafted, that had scarce got over the

remembrance of parting. These regiments, too, comprised many score

of apprentices, whom Parliament allowed to count their time of

military service as though it had been spent with their masters: and

as apprentice and master marched side by side, and it often fell that

the youngster won promotion, with leave to order his elder about, you

may guess there were heart-burnings. Add to this that it kept these

good citizens chafing to note how often (and indeed regularly)

advancement passed them over to light on some young gentleman of

family or 'imp,' as they growled, 'from the Inns of Court.'

We lay--in horse and foot some five thousand strong--well centred in

and about the town and castle of Farnham, with a clear road to London

behind us and in front a nearly equal enemy planted across our

passage to the West. You may take a map with ruler and pencil and

draw a line through from Winchester to Oxford, where the King kept

his Court. On the base of it, at Winchester, rested General Hopton's

main force. North and east of it, at Alton, my Lord Crawford stood

athwart the road with sufficient cavalry and Colonel Bolle's regiment

of foot; yet farther north, Basing House, with my Lord of

Winchester's garrison, blocked the upper path for us; and yet beyond,

Sir Edward Ford's regiment held the passes of the hills toward

Oxford; so that for the while, and in face of us, messengers, troops,

even artillery, might pass to and fro without challenge. This line

of defence, though it forestalled us on every road, was weak in that

it drew out Hopton's strength and attenuated it at too great

distances. This our general perceived, and nursed himself for a

sudden blow.

Now I must mention that with the entry of December there fell the

beginning of a cruel frost, that lasted six weeks and was enough to

make this winter memorable without help of wars or bloodshed.

At the first we all hailed it, as hardening the roads, which for a

month had been nigh impassable: and either commander took speedy

advantage of it--Hopton to make a swift diversion into Sussex and

capture Arundel Castle (which was but a by-blow, for in a few weeks

he had lost it again), and our own general to post up with his short,

quick legs to London, where in two days he had wrung from Essex good

reinforcements, with promise of pay for the troops and a consignment

of leathern guns--a new invention and extremely portable. By the

evening of December 5th he was back among us and despatching us

north, south, and east to keep the enemy jumping while our supplies

drew in.

It was one of those night skirmishes or surprises that brought me

promotion. For on the evening of December 10th our troop, being

ordered out to beat up the neighbourhood of Odiham, on the way fell

in with a half-squadron of the Lord Crawford's cuirassiers, and in

the loose pistol-firing we took five prisoners and lost our cornet,

Master John Ingoldby. The next day we rested; and that morning, as I

sat on a rusty harrow by the forge close beside Farnham Church and

watched the farrier roughing my horse, our Sergeant-Major Le Gaye, a

Walloon, came up to me and desired me to attend on Colonel Stuckey,

who presently and with many kind expressions told me that I was

chosen to fill the room of the dead cornet.

Now this was flattering: and you may think with what elation of mind

I took it, being eager and young (in fact, scarce turned twenty).

But almost it jumped beyond my ambitions at the time. I was one of

five sergeants of the troop, the unripest among them and already

accounted lucky. I knew well that this advancement had passed them

and reached me less for my deserving than because our colonel

preferred to have his commands carried by men of decent birth.

I knew the whole army to be sore already over fifty like promotions,

and foresaw grumbling.

'I bear ye no malice'--this was the way that Roger Inch took it, our

senior sergeant. 'But you'll allow 'tis disheartening to be set

aside for a lawyer-fellow that, a year ago, had never groomed

horse-hair but on his own wig.' And so--but less kindly--the rest of

my fellow-sergeants expressed themselves.

None the less they were ready enough, that evening, to join in

drinking to my new honours. The place was the Bear Inn, in Farnham;

the liquor, warmed ale; and I paid the scot. Towards midnight

Sergeant Inch had so far forgot his rancour as to strike up his song

of _Robin and the Night Owl_--'Robin,' I should explain, being the

Earl of Essex, and the 'Night Owl' our own general, so nicknamed for

his activities after dark.

We broke no regulations by this revelry, being allowed by custom,

after a night in saddle, to spend the next as we chose, provided that

we kept to quarters. For me, though I had done better in bed,

snatching a little sleep, the time was past for seeking it. A picket

of ours had been flung out to westward of the town, on the Alton

Road, and at twelve o'clock I was due to relieve it. So I pushed the

drink around, and felt their grudge against me lessening while

Sergeant Inch sang,--

'Robin's asleep, for Robin is nice;

Robin has delicate habits;

But "Whoo!" says the gray Night Owl--once, twice,

And three times "Whoo!" for the little shy mice,

The mice and the rats and the rabbits,

"Who-oo!"'

At the close of every verse he mimicked an owl's call to the life--

having in his young days been a verderer of the New Forest, on the

edge of Bradley Plain; and at the end of his third verse, in the

middle of a hoot, was answered by a trumpet not far away upon the

road to Alton.

At the sound of it we sprang up, all of us, and two or three ran out

into the street: for the beating up of quarters had become a bad

habit with the two armies, useless as the most of us thought it.

The night outside was freezing villainously: it struck chill into me

after the hot room and the ale-drinking. The moon, as I remember,

was high, shedding a soft foggy light down the roadway: and there, by

the inn doorway, I stood for a minute or two, with my hand on my

sword, peering and listening. To right and left, and from behind me,

came sounds of men moving in their billets to the alarm and waiting,

as I was waiting. But no noise of attack followed the first summons;

and by-and-by I drew back as a brisk footfall broke the hush and came

hurrying down to the doorway of the Bear, where it halted.

'Is that you, Fleming?' said the voice of old Price, our Welsh

quartermaster. 'Then turn out quick to the West Gate! The enemy has

sent in a trumpet in form, and you are to convey him up to the

Castle.'

Without delay I fetched my roan mare from the stable, mounted, and

rode out beyond the West Gate to a point where the little River Wey

runs close alongside the high-road. There I found the trumpet in

converse with our picket, and took stock of him by aid of the

sergeant's lantern. He was a blackavised, burly fellow, with heavy

side-locks, a pimpled face, and about the nose a touch of blue that,

methought, did not come of the frosty air. He sat very high in

saddle, upon a large-jointed bay, and wore a stained coat that

covered his regimentals and reached almost to his rowels. A dirty

red feather wagged over his hat-brim. As I rode up he greeted me

with a jovial brotherly curse, and hoped--showing me his letter--that

we kept good drink at the Castle. 'And if so,' he added, 'your

little William the Conqueror may keep me so long as he has a mind

to.'

I told him, as we rode back and into Farnham, that Sir William, as a

rule, made quick despatch of business.

'He made pretty quick despatch of it at Lansdowne,' said my Cavalier,

and started trolling a catch,--

'Great William the Con,

So fast he did run,

That he left half his name behind him!'

Perceiving him to be an ill-bred fellow, and that to answer his

jeering would be time wasted, I turned the talk upon his message.

'The Lord Crawford sends for an exchange of prisoners?' I hazarded.

'The Lord Crawford does not waste a man of my talents in swapping of

prisoners,' was the response. 'And when Orlando Rich takes the road

and risks his health on such a night as this, you may be sure 'tis on

business of moment.'

I questioned him no further. We rode through the park (the sentries

taking my password), and came to the guardroom of the Castle, where,

as we dismounted, the general's quartermaster lounged out and called

for a couple of men to take our horses. Then, learning that my

companion brought a message from Lord Crawford, he made no delay but

led us straight to the general's room.

Though the clock in the corner had gone midnight, the general sat in

a litter of papers with a lamp at his elbow and his legs stretched

out to a bright sea-coal fire. With him was closeted Colonel

Pottley, of the London train-bands, and by the look of the papers

around them they had been checking the lists (as two days later there

was heavy court-martialling among the newly arrived drafts and

cashiering of officers that had misbehaved in Middlesex).

'You come from the Earl of Crawford?' asked the general, not rising

from his chair, but holding out a hand for the letter.

The messenger presented it, with a good soldierly salute; and so

stood, pulling at his moustachios and looking fierce. 'Your name?'

'Sergeant Orlando Rich, of the Earl's Loyal Troop.' The general

broke the seal, ran his eye over the paper, and let out a short

laugh.

'His lordship sends me his loving compliment and prays me to spare

him a runlet of sack or of malvoisy, for that his own wine is drunk

out and the ale at Alton does not agree with his stomach.'

'Nor with any man's,' corroborated Sergeant Rich.

'He promises to send me a fat ox in exchange, and--' the General

glanced to the foot of the scrawl, turned the paper over, and found

it blank save for the name and direction--'and that, it seems, is

all. No talk of prisoners. . . . Truly an urgent message to send

post at midnight!'

'If you had seen his lordship's condition--' murmured Sergeant Rich.

'His lordship shall have a full hogshead; but not by you;' the

General shot a shrewd glance at the man and bade me step outside

and summon the quartermaster who waited in the corridor.

'Quartermaster,' said he, 'convey this visitor of ours to the

kitchens. Give him what meat and wine he demands. Let him depart

when he will and carry as much as he will--under his skin.

Meantime order out three of the pack-nags, and tell the cellarer to

fetch up six firkins of the sack sent down to me last Thursday by Mr

Trenchard. Have them slung, a pair to each horse, and well secured--

for the roads are slippery. And you, Master Fleming--'

I saluted; flushing, perhaps, a little with pleasure that he

remembered my name.

'Do you mount guard to-night? Then we must find you a substitute.

What say you to convoying this wine, with a trumpet, to my Lord

Crawford? You may choose half a dozen of your troop to ride with

you. The road to Alton cannot easily be missed; and, if it could--

why, these night sallies are the best of training for a young

soldier. I doubt, Master Fleming, that since this morning, when I

promoted you cornet, you have heard talk that glanced upon your

rawness, hey? Well, here is a chance for you to learn. For my part

I call no man a finished campaigner until he can smell his way

through a strange country in the dark. You fancy the errand?

Then go, and prosper: and be sure my Lord Crawford will treat you

kindly, when he has once tasted my wine.'

CHAPTER II.

The stroke of one in the morning, sounding after us from Farnham

clock through the fine frosted air, overtook us well upon the road.

I had made speed, and so had the quartermaster and cellarer. As for

Sergeant Orlando Rich, if he had not achieved speed he had at least

made haste. Before I started my pack-horses from the guardroom door

the cellarer came to me and reported him drunk as a fly; and stepping

into the great kitchen for a slice of pasty, to fortify me against

the night's work, I saw my hero laid out and snoring, with his

shoulder-blades flat on the paved floor. So I left him to sleep it

off.

A fellow of the general's own guard helped me lead my horses to the

door of the Bear, and there I tumbled out my substitute, and six

passably good troopers I had chosen to take with me. They were

Carey, our youngest sergeant, and as good-natured a fellow as I knew;

Randles, who stood well for advancement to the post my own promotion

had left vacant; and four other privates--Shackell, Wyld, Masters,

and Small Owens (as we called him), a Welshman from the Vale of

Cardigan. To prime them for the ride I called up the landlord and

dosed them each with a glass of hot Hollands water; and forth we set,

in good trim and spirits.

For two miles after passing our picket we ambled along at ease.

The moon was low in the south-west, but as yet gave us plenty of

light; and the wind--from the quarter directly opposite--though

bitter and searching, blew behind our right shoulders and helped us

cheerfully along. Our troubles began in a dip of the road on this

side of the hamlet of Froyl, where an autumn freshet, flooding the

highway, had been caught by the frost and fixed in a rippled floor of

ice. We had seen duly to the roughing of our own chargers; and even

they were forced at this passage to feel their steps mincingly; but

the pack-horses, for whom I had only the quartermaster's assurance,

had been handled (if indeed at all) by the inexpertest of smiths.

The poor beasts sprawled and slithered this way and that, and in the

end, as if by consent, came to a pitiful halt, their knees shaking

under them. So they appeared willing to wait and tremble until

morning: but on my order Randles, Owen, and Masters, dismounting, led

them and their own horses, foot by foot, on to sure ground.

For a mile beyond, and some way past Froyl, was safe going if we

avoided the ruts. But here the moon failed us; and when Carey lit a

lantern to help, it showed us that the carriers had no stomach left

in them. One, though the froth froze on him, was sweating like a

resty colt. The other two, if we slacked hold on their halter-ropes,

would lurch together, halt, and slue neck to neck like a couple of

timid dowagers hesitating upon a question of delicacy.

It was here that there came into my head the ill-starred thought of

leading them off the road and through the fields close alongside of

it on our left hand. The road itself I knew pretty well, and that it

bore gradually to the left, all the way to Alton. Carey, whom I

consulted, agreed that we could find it again at any time we chose.

So, and without more ado, we opened the next gate we came to and

herded the beasts through.

The first two fields, being stubble, served us well; and the next,

a pasture, was even better. Beyond this we had some trouble to

find a gate, but at length Masters hit on one a little way out of

our course, and it led to a wide plowland, freshly turned but

hard-frozen, in the furrows of which our horses boggled a good deal.

We pushed across it, holding our line in a long slant back towards

the loom of the tall hedge that (as we agreed) marked the course of

the highway. On the far side of the plow this hedge ran down hill

towards us and more sharply than I had reckoned: yet before regaining

it we had to cross another pasture. I was the surer that this must

be the road because of a light that shone straight ahead of us, which

I took to be the direction of Holibourne village. I should mention,

too, that on our left all the way the ground descended in an easy

slope, but the frost had bound the little river running below and

held it silent.

Sure enough on the far side of the pasture we came to a gate, and

Shackell, who was leading, announced that the high-road lay beyond.

But a minute later he called to us that this could not be: it was too

narrow, a mere lane in fact; and with that, as we pressed up to the

gate, the mischief happened.

The cause of it was a poor starved jackass, that had been sheltering

himself under the lee of the hedge, and now, as we all but trampled

him, heaved himself out of the shadow with a bray of terror.

The sound, bursting upon us at close quarters, was as a stone hurled

into a pool. Round went our horses' rumps, and up went heels and

hoofs. I heard Little Owens cry aloud that his nose was broken.

'Catch hold of the pack-beasts!' I shouted, as they shied back

upon us, and two were caught and held fast--I know not by whom.

The third, the resty one, springing backwards past me, almost on his

haunches, jerked his halter wide of my clutch, and in a moment was

galloping full flight down the slope.

With a call to the others to stand steady and wait for me, I wheeled

my mare about and rode off in chase, to round him up. The almost

total darkness made this hunting mighty unpleasant; but I knew that,

bating the chance of being flung by a mole-hill, I had my gentleman

safe enough. For, to begin with, he must soon find the pace irksome,

with two firkin casks jolting against his ribs; and at the foot of

the descent the river would surely head him off. To be sure it was

frozen hard and he might have crossed it dry-footed, but the alders

on the bank frighted him back, and presently I had him penned in an

angle between hedge and stream. Here, as I slowed up and advanced to

coax him, from out of the darkness behind him there broke suddenly a

shouting and pounding of hoofs, and close in front of me (but hidden

by the hedge) a troop of horsemen clattered down from the farther

slope and up the lane where my comrades were gathered.

If for a moment I doubted what it all might mean, a couple of

pistol-shots, followed by a loose volley that mixt itself with oaths

and yells, all too quickly put this out of doubt. My men were being

charged, without question or challenge, by a troop of the enemy,

while separated by a quarter of a mile of darkness and stiff rising

ground from me, who alone carried their credentials. Little need to

say in what hurry I wheeled my mare about to the slope, struck spur,

dragged my trumpet loose on its sling and blew, as best I could, the

call that both armies accepted for note of parley. Belike (let me do

the villains this credit), with the jolt and heave of the mare's

shoulders knocking the breath out of me, I sounded it ill, or in

the noise and scuffle they heard confusedly and missed heeding.

The firing continued, at any rate, and before I gained the gate the

fight had swept up the lane.

I swung out upon the hard stones and dashed after it. But the enemy,

by this, had my fellows on the run, and were driving them at stretch

gallop. To worsen my plight, as I pursued I caught sound of hoofs

pounding behind and, as it seemed, overtaking me; supposed that a

horseman was riding me down; and, reining the mare back fiercely,

slued about to meet his onset. It proved to be the poor pack-horse I

had left in the valley! He must have galloped like a racer; but now

he came to a halt, and thrust his poor bewildered face towards me

through the darkness. Commending him to the devil, I wheeled about

once more and struck spur; and as I galloped, he galloped anew

behind.

This diversion had cost me a good fifty yards. I knew well enough

that the lane sooner or later must lead out into the high-road, and

made sure that if my fellows gained it first they would head back for

Farnham. (What would befall me I left to Providence!) But some two

or three of the enemy must have raced ahead and cut off that retreat;

for when I came to it the way to the right lay open indeed, but the

whole welter was pounding down the road to the left, straight for

Alton. Again I followed, and in less than two hundred yards was

pressing close upon three or four of the rearmost riders. This

seemed to me good opportunity for another call on my trumpet, and I

blew, without easing my speed. On the sound of it, one of the dark

figures in front swung round in saddle and fired, I saw the flash and

the light of it on his gorget and morion: and with that, the bullet

glancing against my mare's shoulder, she swerved wildly, leapt high,

and came down with forelegs planted, pitching me neck-and-crop out of

saddle upon the frozen road.

CHAPTER III.

Doubtless the fall stunned me; but doubtless also not for more than a

few seconds. For I awoke to the drum of distant hoofs, and before it

died clean away I had recovered sense enough to take its bearing in

the direction of Farnham. Strangely enough, towards Alton all was

quiet. Sitting up, with both hands pressing my head, for just a

moment I recognised the gallop for my own mare's. Another beat time

with it. I asked myself, why another? She would be heading for

home--wounded, perhaps--scared certainly. But why with a companion?

. . . Then, suddenly, I remembered the poor pack-beast; and as I

remembered him, all my faculties grew clouded.

Or so, at least, I must suppose; for of the sudden silence on the

Alton road I thought not at all. What next engaged me was a feeling

of surprise that, of my two hands pressed on my temples, the right

was cold, but the left, though it met the wind, unaccountably warm--

the wrist below it even deliciously, or so it felt until rubbing my

palms together I found them sticky, with blood.

The blood, I next discovered, was welling from a cut on my left

temple. Putting up my fingers, I felt the fresh flow running over a

crust of it frozen on my cheek; and wondered how I might stanch it.

I misdoubted my strength to find the lane again and creep down to the

river; and the river, moreover, would be frozen. For a certainty I

should freeze to death where I lay, and even more surely on the road

back to Farnham I must faint and drop and, dropping, be frozen.

With that, I remembered the light we had seen shining ahead of us as

we crossed the fields; and staggered along in search of it, after

first groping for my morion, which had rolled into the hedge some

paces away.

For a while, confused in my bearings, I sought on the wrong hand; but

by-and-by caught the twinkle of it through a gate to the left, and

studied it, leaning my arms on the bar. The house whence it shone

could not be any part of Holibourne village, but must stand somewhere

on high rising ground across the valley. I might reckon to reach it

by turning back and taking the lane in which we had been surprised:

but this meant fetching a long circuit. I was weakening with loss of

blood, and--it coming into my mind that the river below would be

hard--I resolved to steer a straight line and risk obstacles.

As it turned out, there were none, or none to throw me back. At the

stream-side, holding by an elder-bough, I tested the ice with my

weight, proved it firm, crossed without so much as cracking it, and

breasted a bare grassy slope, too little to be called a down, where a

few naked hawthorns chafed and creaked in the wind. Above it was an

embankment rounded like a bastion, up the left side of which I

crept--or, you might almost say, crawled--and, reaching the top,

found myself close under the front of a dwelling-house.

It was coated with whitewash, the glimmer of which showed me the

queer shape of the building even in the darkness. It consisted of

two stories, both round as pepper-pots. Above the first ran a narrow

circular thatch, serving as a mat (so to say) for the second and

smaller pepper-pot. I could not discern how this upper story was

roofed, but the roof had a hole in it, from which poured a stray ray

of light. Light shone too, but through a blind, from a small window

close under the eaves. The lower story showed none at all.

I rapped on the door. There came no response, though I waited and

listened for a full minute. I rapped again and shouted; and was

about to challenge for the third time, when the threshold showed a

chink of light. Muffled footsteps came down the passage, and with

much creaking the bolts were undrawn.

'Who knocks?' demanded a man's voice, somewhat shrill and querulous.

'Cannot a poor scholar rest in peace, and at this time o' night?'

'In the name of Charity!' I urged.

He flung the door open and stood with a hand-lamp held high,

surveying me: a little old man, thin as a rat, in skullcap, furred

gown, and list slippers. The lamp shone down on his silvered hair

and on a pair of spectacles he had pushed up to the edge of his cap;

and showed me a face mildly meditative from the brow down to the

chin, which by contrast was extremely resolute.

'More soldiers!' he observed testily. 'The plague take it that they

and the meteors must choose the same night to drop from heaven!

How many of you, this time?'

I answered that I was alone, and would have added a word on my

plight; but this, beneath the lamp-light, he could not miss

perceiving, for my face and the left shoulder of my buff coat were a

mask of blood.

'H'm!'--he cut me short. 'It may sound to you unfeeling: but if

Heaven persists in sending me soldiers I had rather physic than feed

them:' and with that he stood aside as inviting me to enter. Be sure

I obeyed him gladly, and, stepping inside, rested my hand for a

moment against the jamb of a door that stood open to the right.

The ray of his lamp, as he held it near to examine me, gave me a

glimpse of the room within--of a table with cloth awry, of overturned

flagons lying as they had spilt their wine-stains, of chairs and

furniture pushed this way and that.

'So your predecessors have left me,' said the old gentleman, catching

the direction of my gaze and nodding. 'Whether or no they have left

me enough for the morning's breakfast is a matter my servant must

discover when he comes over from Holibourne at daylight.'

'They were Malignants, sir, as I guess: the Earl of Crawford's men.'

'Devil a groat care I what you call them, or they call themselves!

I study the heavens and take no heed of your sublunary divisions.

But they have eaten and drunk me out of house and home; at that hour,

too, when the most meteors were predicted: and what is worse they

invaded my garret in their clumsy jack-boots, and have thrown my

Orchestra Coeli out of gear. I was mending it when you knocked.

By the way,' he added more kindly, 'I can go on mending it while you

wash your wound, which will appear less horrid when cleansed of all

this blood. I have a fire upstairs, and hot water. Come.'

He closed the outer door and, taking me gently by the elbow,

half-supported me up the stairway, which was little better than a

ladder, and led direct to the strangest room I have ever set eyes on.

It was circular--in diameter perhaps twelve feet--with a high conical

roof. The roof had an inner lining of wood, and through a hole in

it--where a panel had been slid back--a large optic-glass, raised on

a pivot-stand, thrust its nose out into the night. Close within the

door stood an oaken press, and beside it, on a tripod, a brazier

filled with charcoal and glowing. A truckle-bed, a chair, and two

benches made up the rest of the furniture: and of the benches one was

crowded with all manner of tools--files by the score, pliers, small

hammers, besides lenses, compasses, rules, and a heap of brass

filings; the other, for two-thirds of its length, was a litter of

books and papers. But the end nearest to the working-bench had been

cleared, and here stood a mighty curious intricate mechanism of

wheels and brass wire and little brass balls, with fine brass chains

depending through holes in the board. My host flung a tender look at

it across his shoulder as he stepped to the press to fetch basin and

towel.

'The oaf has dislocated the pin of the fly-wheel,' he grunted.

'Praise Heaven, he never guessed that it worked on a diamond, or

slight chance had my poor toy with his loutish fingers stuck in it!'

He filled the basin with water from a copper ewer that rested close

to the brazier on a file of folios, and set it to heat. 'I doubt I

must give up the meteors to-night,' he continued, and went back to

his machine, with which, I could see, his fingers were itching to be

busy.

I asked, 'Is that, sir, an invention of yours?'

'Ay, soldier,' he answered; 'mine solely; the child of my brain's

begetting.' His hands hovered over the delicate points and wires.

'And to be murdered thus by a great thumb-fingered dragoneer!'

With a lens and a delicate needle, he began to peer and prise in it;

and anon, fixing the lens in his eye, reached out for his hand-lamp.

'To what use have you designed it, sir?' I asked, after a while spent

in watching him.

'To no use at all, soldier,' he answered, more tartly. 'The water is

warm, and you can bathe your hurt and afterwards I will plaster it.'

While I laved my temple with the edge of the towel, between the dip

of the water I heard his voice in broken sentences: 'To no use at

all. . . . Would a man ask the sun to what use it danced? . . .

or the moon and planets? . . .'

I looked up, dabbing my wound gently. His voice had risen and

stretched itself on a high, monotonous pitch. He was declaiming

verse.

'Who doth not see the measures of the Moon?

Which thirteen times she dances every year,

And ends her Pavane thirteen times as soon

As doth--

Hey? Do you know the lines, soldier?' He stepped forward and peered

close at my head while I shook it. 'Tush! a cut, a trifle! Go on

bathing. . . . The lines, sir, were writ by Sir John Davies, the

first of English poets.'

'Indeed, sir,' said I. 'Now at the Inner Temple, before mixing

myself in these troubles, I used to read much poetry and dispute on

it with other young men. We had our several laureates; but believe

me-and despise if you will--although we had heard tell of Sir John

Davies, I doubt if one in six of us had read a line of him.'

'Ay, indeed,' he caught me up, 'I have scarce read a line of any

other. Having discovered him I had no need. For allow me to

observe--although I know nothing about it--that in poetry the Subject

is nine points of excellence; and, Sir John Davies having hit on the

most exalted subject tractable by the Muse, it follows that he must

be the most exalted poet. Let me tell you--if it will shorten

argument--that in general, and in all walks of life, I hate the

second-best.'

'I have heard, sir,' said I, 'that this masterpiece was a poem on

Dancing. But you must be thinking of another.'

'Not at all, young man,' my host replied, poring anew into his toy.

'"Orchestra" is the name of it; the subject, Dancing. But what

dancing!--the sun, the moon, the stars--Eh? Halleluia, but it goes

again!'

Sure enough, bending over the basin, I heard a buzz of wheels, and

looked up to see the whole machine springing like a score of

whipping-tops gone mad, the brass balls swinging and rotating so fast

that the eye lost them in little twinkling circles and ellipses, the

wheels whirring and filling the room with their hum.

My astronomer had dived under the bench. I saw for the moment little

more than his posterior and the soles of his list slippers.

'You'll pardon me,' I heard him grunt, and the speed of the machinery

slackened as he attached a couple of leaden weights to the dependent

chains. He backed, crawled out, and stood erect; adjusted his

spectacles, and stood beaming upon his invention.

'But what is the signification, sir?' I asked, rising from my chair

and stepping close.

'Ah! You improve, soldier. It hath signification, not use: and it

signifies the motion of the heavens. See--this larger ball is the

sun; and here, on their several rods, the planets--all swinging in

their courses. By a pointer on this dial-plate--observe me now--I

reduce the space of a day to one, two, three minutes, as I chose,

retarding or accelerating, but always in just proportion. 'Tis set

for these December days; you will remark the sun's ambit--how it lies

south of the zenith, and how far short it rises and falls from the

equinoctial points. But wait awhile, and in a few minutes--that is

to say, days--you shall see him start to widen his circuit. Here now

is Saturn, with his rim: and here Venus--mark how delicately she

lifts, following the motion of her lord--`

'Just with the Sun her dainty feet doth move--'

'And this is Dancing--Orchestra Coeli--the Dancing of the Firmament.'

'Wonderful!' I cried.

'You shall say so presently! So far you have only seen: now hear!'

He drew out a small brass pin from the foot of the mechanism, and at

once it began to hum, on three or four notes such as children make

with a comb and a scrap of paper.

The notes lifted and fell, and the little balls--each in his separate

circle--wheeled and spun, twinkling in time with them, until my head,

too, began to swim.

'It will run for an hour now,' my host assured me. 'Indeed, with one

to watch and draw up the weights at due intervals, it will run for

ever.'

'It dizzies me,' said I.

'Your head is light, belike, with the loss of blood. Sit you back in

the chair, and I will try now what may be done with ointment and

plaster.'

He forced me to seat myself and, fetching a small medicine-box from

the press, began to operate. His fingers were extraordinarily quick

and thin, and so delicate of touch that I felt no pain, or very

little: but though I lay with my head far back and saw the machine no

longer, it had set my brain spinning, and the pressure of his hands

appeared to be urging it round and round, while his voice (for he

talked without intermission) mingled and interwove itself with the

drone of the music from the table. He was reciting verses; from his

favourite poem, no doubt. But though the sound of them ran in my

ears like a brook, I can remember one couplet only,--

'And all in sundry measures do delight,

Yet altogether keep no measure right. . . .'

I dare say that, yielding to the giddiness, I swooned: and yet I can

remember no interval. The circles seemed to have hold of me, to be

drawing me down, and yet down; until, like a diver half-bursting for

breath, I found strength, sprang upwards, and reached the surface

with a cry.

The cry rang in my ears yet. But had it come, after all, from my own

lips? I gripped the arms of the chair in a kind of terror, and

leaned forward, staring at my host, who had fallen back a pace, and

stood between me and the lamp.

'Pardon me, sir,' I found voice to say after a pause 'I must have

fallen into a doze, I think. My head--' I put a hand up to it and

discovered that it was bandaged. He did not answer me, but appeared

to be listening. 'My head--' I repeated, and again stopped short--

this time at sound of a cry.

It came from the night without: and at once I knew it to be a

repetition of the sound that had aroused me. Nor was it, in fact, a

cry, though it rose like a cry against the wind: rather, a confused

uproar of voices, continuous, drawing nearer and nearer.

Then, as I stared at my host and he at me, the noise became

articulate as drunken singing--'_Tow, row, row! Tow, row, row! . . .

Crop-headed Puritans, tow, row, row. . . . Boot and saddle, and tow,

row, row!_--and, nearing so, broke into chorus,--

'Waller and Hazelrigg, Stapleton, Scroop--

Way! Make way for His Majesty's troop!

Crop-headed Puritans durstn't deny

His Majesty's gentlemen riding by,

With boot and saddle and tow-row-row!'

'Good Lord!' muttered my host, casting out his two hands in despair.

'More soldiers!'

But by this time I had my hand on the door. 'Guide me down the

stairs,' I commanded; 'down to the door! And, before you open it,

quench the light!'

By the time we reached the door the voices were close at hand, coming

down the lane: and by each note of them I grew more clearly

convinced. 'Sir,' I asked in a whisper, 'does this lane lead off

from the road on the near side of Alton?

For a moment it seemed that he did not hear me. 'Pray Heaven I

dowsed the light in time!' he chattered. 'Three visits in one night

is more than my sins deserve. . . . Yes; the lane enters a half-mile

this side of Alton, and returns back--'

'Well enough I know where it returns back' said I. 'Man, did you

bewitch them?--as, a while ago, you bewitched me?'

'Eh?'

I felt that he was peering at me in the dark.

'_Something_ has bewitched them,' I persisted. 'Either the wine or

that devil's toy of yours has hold of them; or the both, belike.

These are the same men, and have travelled full circle, listen to

them!--'tis the music of the spheres, sir.'

'I believe you are right,' said my host, with a chuckle.

'O, Copernicus!'

I drew the door open gently and looked aloft. The night, before so

starry, was now clouded over. The troopers--I could hear their

horses' hoofs above the whoops and yells of their chorusing--were

winding downhill by a sunken way within ten yards of me. A gravel

path lay between me and the hedge overlooking it. This I saw by the

faint upcast rays of the lanterns they had lit for guidance.

I tip-toed across to the hedge, and, peering over, was relieved of my

last doubt: for at the tail of the procession and under charge of one

drunken trooper for whipper-in, rode all my poor comrades with arms

triced behind them and ankles lamentably looped under their horses'

bellies.

Even as they passed a thought came into my head: and the face of the

whipper-in--seen dimly in the shadow of a lantern he joggled at his

saddle-bow--decided me. I slipped off my sash, looped it loosely in

my hand, and so, without waiting to say farewell to my host, slid

down the bank into the lane.

Though I shot over the frozen bank a deal faster than ever I intended

and dropped on the roadway with a thud, the trooper, bawling his

chorus, did not turn in his saddle. I tip-toed after him, between a

walk and a run, and still he did not turn. Not till I was level with

his stirrup did he guess that I was on him; and even so he could

scarcely roar out a curse before I had my sash flung over him and

with a jerk fetched him clean out of his saddle. As he pitched

sideways, the lantern fell with a clatter and rolled into the hedge.

'What the devil's up with you, back there!' At the noise, I heard

two or three of the midmost troopers rein up.

'Right! All right!' I called forward to them, catching the horse's

bridle and at the same time stooping over the poor fool--to gag him,

if need were. He lay as he had fallen. I hope I have not his death

to my account, and for certain no corpse lay in the road when I

passed along it a few hours later.

'Right!' I called sturdily, deepening my voice to imitate that of my

victim as nearly as I could match it--

'Crop-headed Puritans, tow-row-row!'

Still shouting the chorus, I mastered the reluctant horse, swung

myself into saddle, and edged up towards my comrades.

'Carey! Shackell!' I called softly, overtaking them.

At the sound of my voice, they came near to letting out a cry that

had spoilt all. Masters, indeed, started a yell: but Small Owens

(whose bands I had fortunately cut the first) reached out a hand and

clapped it over his mouth.

'How many be they?' I asked as we rode.

'Twenty-two,' answered Randles, chafing his wrists, 'and all drunk as

lords.'

'If we had arms,' said Carey, 'we might drive the whole lot.'

'But since you have not,' said I, 'we must pitch our attempt lower.

In three minutes we shall reach the high-road; and then strike spurs

all to the right for Farnham!'

But our luck proved better than we hoped. For as we drew near the

exit of the lane, I heard a voice challenge. The chorus, which had

lasted us all the way, ceased on a sudden, and was taken up by a

pistol-shot. At once I guessed that here must be help, and, feeling

for my trumpet, found it and blew the call. Naked of weapons as my

comrades were, we charged down on the rear, broke it, and flung it

upon the darkness, where by this time we could hear the voice of

Wilkins, our sergeant-major, bellowing above the tumult.

Within five minutes this double charge settled all. The pack-horses

were ours again, with twenty-one inebriate prisoners. My mare,

galloping home with the third pack-horse at her heels, had alarmed

the picket, and Wilkins, with twenty men, had turned out to scour the

Alton road.

So, while we secured our drunkards to the last man, I had leisure to

bless my fortune.

CHAPTER IV.

By this time dawn had begun to grow in the sky behind us. I handed

over the prisoners to Wilkins and Carey, and gave Wyld and Masters

leave to return with them to Farnham: 'for,' said I, 'they seem the

weariest, and Shackell and Small Owens will serve well enough for

escort by daylight.'

Wilkins stared. 'You are not telling me,' said he, that you intend

going forward with that silly wine, and you in such plight!'

'There's my orders, to begin with,' said I; 'and--bless the man!--you

don't suppose, after this night's work, I mean to miss the fun of it,

now that the luck is turned and is running. As for the wine, Lord

Crawford will get but three firkins for his hogshead; but if his

rascals choose to play highwaymen upon a peaceful convoy, that is

_his_ look-out. And as for my plight, I shall present myself with

these bandages and ask him what manner of troops he commands, that do

violence upon a trumpet honourably sent to him and on his own

petition.'

And this (to shorten my tale) I did. With Shackell and Small Owens I

herded my two pack-horses along the road to Alton, and arrived at the

earl's outposts without mishap and within half an hour past daybreak.

There I sounded my trumpet, and was led without ado to his lordship's

headquarters.

I found him seated with his secretary and with a grave, handsome man,

Colonel John Bolle, that commanded his regiment of infantry, and was

killed next day defending Alton Church (I have heard), in the very

pulpit. This Colonel Bolle bowed to me very courteously, but the

earl (as one could tell at first sight) was sulky: belike by

deprivation of his favourite drink. Or perhaps the ale he took in

lieu of it--he had a tankard at his elbow--had soured on his stomach.

'Hey?' he began, frowning, as he broke the seal of my letter.

'Are all General Waller's troopers in this condition? Or does he

think it manners to send me a trumpeter in such trim?'

'My lord,' said I, 'your wine and my poor self have come by a

roundabout road, and on the way have been tapped of a trifle.'

'By whom, sir?'

'By certain of your men, my lord.'

'I'll hang 'em for it, then.'

'I thank you, my lord; but for that you must treat with General

Waller.' And I told him the tale, or so much of it as I thought was

good for him.

At the close he eyed me awhile angrily, with his brows drawn down.

'You are an impudent knave, sir, to stand and tell me this to my

face. Look ye here, Bolle'--he swung round upon the colonel, who had

put forth a hand as though to arrest this unseemly abuse. 'How do I

know that this dog has not tampered with the wine? By God!' he broke

out as a servant entered with a stoup of it, 'I'll not drink it--I'll

not drink a drop of it--until this fellow has first tasted it, here,

in our presence.'

I believe that I went white: but 'twas with rage. 'Give me a glass

of it,' I answered; and, as the servant filled and handed to me,

'The wine, my lord, came on your own petition and at your own risk,

as I must remind you. Nevertheless, I will drink--to your long life,

and better manners.' I drank, set down the glass, and asked, after a

pause, 'May I go, my lord?'

'You may go to the devil!'

I hesitated. 'There was, as I remember, some little mention of an

ox--'

'You may tell your master to come and fetch it,' he growled.

Well, my master did fetch it, and with speed. That same night he

assembled five thousand men without beat of drum in the park at

Farnham, and at seven o'clock we marched off towards Basing. On the

way to Crondall, we of the horse halted for an hour to let the foot

regiments catch up with us, and all together headed down upon Alton.

In this way, at nine in the morning, we came down upon the west of

the town, while the earl kept watch on the roads to the eastwards;

and charged at once.

I say that the earl kept watch; but in truth he had put this duty

upon his captains, while he still fuddled himself with our general's

sack. He and his horse never gave fight, but galloped before us on

the road to Winchester; along which, after close on an hour's chase,

our trumpets recalled us as our infantry forced the doors of Alton

Church, and cut up Colonel Bolle's regiment that still resisted

there. The Earl of Crawford left a good half of his wine behind, and

two days later our general, who had sent for me, showed me this

letter--

'To Sir W. Waller.

'Sir,--I hope your gaining of Alton cost you dear. It was your

lot to drink of your own sack, which I never intended to have

left for you. I pray you favour me so much as to send me your

own chirurgeon, and upon my honour I will send you a person

suitable to his exchange.--Sir, your servant,

'Crawford.'

From this happy success it was my fortune, that same afternoon, to

lead our troop back to Farnham. Coming on the way to the entrance of

a lane on our right, I avoided the high-road for the by-path.

It twisted downhill to the river, crossed it, and by-and-by in a dip

of the farther slope, brought me in sight of a round cottage of two

stories. No smoke arose from it, though the twilight was drawing in

upon a frost that searched our bones as we rode. No inhabitant

showed a face. But I waved a hand in passing, and I am mistaken if a

hand did not respond from the upper story--by drawing a shutter

close.

RED VELVET.

[August, 1644. The Story is told by Ralph Medhope, Captain of the

Twenty-second (or Gray-coat) Troop of Horse in the Parliament Army,

then serving in Cornwall.]

We were eight men in the picket. My cornet, Ned Penkevill, rode

beside me; our trumpeter, Israel Hutson, a pace or two behind; with

five troopers following. I could tell you their names, but there is

no need, for I alone of the eight come into the story. The rest rode

to their death that night, and met it in the dawn, like men.

We rode northward and inland along the downs high over the left bank

of the Fowey River; with good turf and heather underfoot, and with

the moon behind our right shoulders. She was the harvest moon, now

in her last quarter, and from her altitude I guessed it, by west

country time, to be well past four of the morning or within an hour

of daybreak. But because she hung bright up here, we pricked forward

warily, using every pit and hollow. We had left our breast-pieces,

back-pieces, and gorgets behind us, with Penkevill's standard, for

the main troop to carry; and rode in plain gray jerkins--bareheaded

too, since on mounting the rise above the valley-fog we had done off

our morions (for fear of the moonlight) and hidden them in a

furze-brake, where belike next summer the heather-bees found and made

hives of them.

Fog, rolling up from the sea--seven or eight miles away--filled all

the valley below us: and this fog was the reason of our riding.

For the valley formed the neck of a trap in which the King held our

general with two thousand five hundred horse, six thousand infantry,

and I know not how many guns. His own artillery lined the heights

under which we rode--that is, to left or east of the river; he had

pushed across a couple of batteries to the opposite hills, and

between them easily commanded the valley. It was just the ease of it

that made him careless and gave us our chance. He had withdrawn the

better part of his horse to the coast, to make a display against our

scattered base; and our general, aware of this, was even meditating

an assault on the heights when the sudden fog changed his plans and

he resolved to march his horse, under cover of it, straight through

the trap. The risk, to be sure, was nearly desperate; since, for

aught he knew, the King was marching back his troops under the same

cover, and to be caught in that narrow valley (which was plashy,

moreover, and in places flooded) would mean the total loss of his

cavalry. Yet he had spoken cheerfully when I took leave of him and

rode off with my seven men--our business being to watch along the

enemy's lines for any movement, to sound a warning if necessary, and,

if surprised or caught, so to behave as to lead suspicion away from

the movement of the main body.

The enemy kept loose watch up here. We could see his camp-fires

dotted on the ridge between us and the dark woods of Boconnock, where

the owls hooted; but either we were lucky or his outposts had been

carelessly set. Clearly no alarm had reached these encampments.

But Heaven knew what might be happening, or preparing to happen, in

the valley. There at any moment the report of a single musket might

tell us that all was lost.

Penkevill--a good lad--insisted that all was well. Our men had been

due to start at two o'clock, and all delay allowed for, by this time

they should be past the gut of the valley, where an opposing force

would certainly choose to post itself.

My answer to this was that, even allowing it, we must wait for the

sound of fighting at Respryn Bridge, farther up the vale, or at one

of the two fords a little below it. For there, and there only, could

our men cross the river, as they must to hit off any line of escape

through Liscard and into Devon. The bridge we knew to be held by a

guard, and almost to a certainty the fords, though swollen by recent

rains, would be watched also. It was a part of the plan to surprise

and force these crossings, and no question but that--unless their

guard had been strengthened--they could be forced. But as certainly

the guard, however weak, would make at least some show of fight; so

certainly, indeed, that the sound of firing here was to announce

success and be our signal to rejoin the main body.

Now from this bridge of Respryn a highway climbs from the valley and

runs due east across the downs; that is to say, straight athwart the

track we were holding; and our orders were on no account to cross

this highway, but to halt at some little distance on the near side of

it, place ourselves in cover, and so await the signal. For the enemy

held it--we could spy a couple of their camp-fires on the rise where

it crosses Five Barrow Hill, with a third somewhat nearer, by the

cross lanes called Grey Mare--and it would assuredly be patrolled.

If in attempting to cross it we fell foul of the patrol, the alarm

might draw their troops down towards the bridge; and again, if we

crossed it without mishap, we should be no better placed and might

easily overshoot our mark, for somewhere alongside this road our

general would direct his retreat, over the heather and short turf

that stretched for miles ahead and for a mile or more on either

hand--fair open country and for cavalry the best in the world.

Accordingly we found cover in a belt of fir-trees overlooking the

valley, and for a while possessed our souls in patience. We were

early, having come without mishap or challenge, and to expect a like

speed of two thousand five hundred men--riding in thick fog through

water-meadows, with ditches to be crossed and gates to be found and

passed--was in the last degree unreasonable. Nevertheless, dawn

could not be far off, and as the minutes dragged by, my spirits sank

and my thoughts ran on a score of possible disasters.

By-and-by the sky began to pale. We heard a small troop of horsemen

coming down the road at a walk--a patrol perhaps, or perhaps they

were riding down to relieve the guard by the bridge. We listened and

made out their number to be twenty or thereabouts. The wind had

shifted--another good reason for keeping on our side of the road--and

blew from them to us; but our horses were well trained. The troop

drew level with our hiding; we could hear the jingling of their bits,

and with that came our signal. A couple of pistol shots rang out;

they made every man of us start in his saddle, and they were followed

by a volley.

In my surprise I had dug spur and pushed out beyond our clump of

firs, almost before it struck me that the sound came not from the

valley but from ahead of us, across the road and some way up the

slope. My first motion had been to charge the troopers in the

roadway, to drive them (or at least to check them) from helping at

the bridge; and I had done more wisely by holding to it, even upon

second thought, for they had wheeled towards the sound and so gave

their backs to us. While they stood thus we might have charged

through them, and all had been well.

As it was, they offered us this chance for a moment only; and then,

striking spur, scrambled up the bank on the far side of the road and

headed across the turf at a gallop. We looked, and slowly we

understood. For half a mile away, up the rise of the downs, a broad

dark shadow was moving; and we had scarcely discerned it before, in

the pale of the dawn, small points of light wavered and broke upon

morions, gorgets, cuirasses. That moving shadow was our own main

body, climbing the hill at a gentle trot.

A few picketers hung on their rear. It was these, of course, that

had given the alarm: and by-and-by the trumpets taking it up on Five

Barrow Hill, a body of four hundred horse came over the rise at a

gallop and bore down obliquely on the mass--very confidently at

first: but at closer quarters it lost heart and started off to harass

the right flank of the solid mass, that paid it little attention and

held on its way without swerving.

Before this we had put our horses in motion, to overtake the patrol

(as I will call it) and break through to join our comrades. But here

it was that our delay proved fatal. For turning at the sound of our

gallop, and belike judging us to be the advance-guard of a second

large body of horse, the leader of the patrol wheeled his men about,

halted them for a moment, and so charged them straight down upon us.

In numbers they were more than two to one, with the advantage of the

slope, and albeit we fought fiercely for a minute, they broke us and

drove us back headlong on the road. Nor did they stop here, but,

having us on the run, headed us right down the road to the bridge.

Here, at the bridge-head, finding it unguarded, I managed to wheel

about and beat off a couple of pursuers: and Israel Hutson and one of

the troopers joining me, we three blocked the passage and could not

be dislodged. For the bridge was extremely narrow; so narrow,

indeed, that in either parapet the builders had provided an embrasure

here and there, for the foot-traveller to step aside if he should

meet a passing wagon.

The cavaliers, confronted by this remnant of us, and still perhaps

believing that we counted on support, drew off some thirty yards, and

were plainly in two minds whether to attack us again or to drop the

business and ride back towards the trumpet-calls now sounding

confusedly along the crest of the downs; when, to their and our worse

dismay, was heard a pounding of hoofs on the road behind us, and over

the bridge at our backs came riding a rabble of mounted men with a

woman at their head--a woman dressed all in scarlet with a black

flapping hat and a scarlet feather. What manner of woman she was I

had no time to guess. But she rode with uplifted arm, grasping a

pistol and waving the others forward; and her followers--who in no

way resembled soldiers--poured after her, shouting, clearly bent on

our destruction.

I had managed to recharge my two pistols; and now, thrusting one into

my belt and grasping the other, with my sword dangling handy on a

wrist-knot, I dismounted and slipped into the nearest embrasure,

there to sell my life as dearly as might be. As I did so I heard,

above the pounding of hoofs, five or six shots fired, and saw Hutson

fling up his arms in the act of dismounting, fall his length across

the roadway, and lie still under the feet of my own terrified horse.

The trooper made a plunge forward as if to hurl himself through the

patrol; and they, no doubt, disposed of him. I never saw him again.

For me, I faced upon the new assailants, as the spitting of bullets

on the parapet directed me, and found little time to wonder what

manner of people these were who so plainly intended to murder me.

Some rode on cart-horses; one or two flourished pitchforks; and if

ever a man had a sense of taking his leave of life in a nightmare it

was I during that next minute. It seemed that a dozen were on me.

I cannot remember letting off my second pistol; but for some time,

with my back to the angle of the embrasure, I held my own with almost

astonishing ease, and might have held it for many minutes--my

opponents being more savage than skilful--had not one of them

barbarously hurled his pitchfork at me as a man throws a spear.

One point of it pierced and stuck in the upper muscles of my left

arm; the other pricked pretty sharply upon a rib; and the pain of

this double stroke forced me to drop my sword and make a snatch at

the accursed missile, to pluck it out. 'Twas the work of two seconds

at most, and then with a jerk upon the wrist-knot I had the

sword-hilt again in my grip; but it let three stout ruffians in upon

me to finish me. And this they were setting about with a will when,

as I beat up a stroke that threatened to cleave my skull, I heard a

voice calling on them to hold, and the lady in scarlet forced her

horse between us. As the brute's shoulder pressed me back into the

angle of my embrasure she held out her pistol at arm's length, her

finger on the trigger, and pointed it at close quarters full on my

face.

'You are my prisoner.'

I stared up and along the pistol barrel and met her eyes. They

looked down on me disdainfully, with no mercy in them, but (it seemed

to me) a certain curiosity. A slight frown puckered her brows.

She had spoken in a cold, level voice, and if her colour was pale,

her manner and bearing showed no trace of agitation.

'Would seem,' said I, 'there is no choice. I submit, madam--to your

pleasure, but not to the rabble you lead.'

At this her eyebrows lifted a little. 'A gentleman?' I heard her

say, but rather to herself than to me.

'To the extent,' I answered, 'of having a distaste for pitchforks.'

She made no reply to this, but turned about on her men who were

murmuring and calling to one another to cut my throat. 'I think you

heard me say that this officer is my prisoner. The man who forgets

it I will have flogged and afterwards shot. And now stand back, if

you please.'

I had made a motion to hand her my sword, but she signed to me to

keep it, and rode off towards the patrol, leaving the crowd to stare

at me. Being unsure how far her authority prevailed with them, I

stuck to my embrasure, and kept an eye lifting for danger, while I

wiped, as carelessly as might be, the sweat from my forehead--for the

work had been hot while it lasted. I had laid out a couple of these

yokels in good earnest, and while their comrades dragged them away,

and, propping them against the parapet opposite, called for water to

bathe their wounds, I became unpleasantly sensible of my own hurts.

The stab in my upper arm, though it bled little, kept burning as

though the pitchfork had been dipped in poison; and from the less

painful scratch on the ribs I was losing blood; I could feel it

welling under my shirt, and running warm down the hollow of my groin.

Loss of blood, they say, will often clarify a man's eyesight and

quicken his other faculties; or it may be that, as the morning sun

ate up what remained of the fog, all around me--the bridge and the

persons upon it, the trees up the valley, the river tumbling

between--on a sudden grew distinct to the view. At any rate, in my

memory, as out of a blurred print, springs the apparition of my lady

as she came riding back from her parley with the patrol, with the

sunlight on her flaming feather and habit of red velvet, and her

horse's shadow moving clear-cut along the granite parapet. Nay, it

seemed that her voice, too, had a sharper edge as she spoke to me.

'I have explained to the captain, yonder, that you are my prisoner.

Which is your horse?--the dark bay, I think.' For they had captured

mine as well as poor Hutson's, and a servant held the pair by the

bridge-end.

'It is, madam.'

She motioned to the man to lead him forward. 'Now mount,' she said;

'and follow me, if you please. You may keep your sword.'

Mounting, to a man in my plight, was no such easy matter; but she had

walked forward to give some directions about the wounded men, and did

not perceive the pain it cost me. Yet (I told myself) she must have

seen me take my wound; and her indifference angered me.

Having mounted and found my stirrups, I shut my teeth hard.

'Are you ready?' she asked, glancing back over her shoulder.

'At your service, madam.'

Without another word or look she started at a brisk trot, which I

forced my horse to copy, though it gave me the most discomfort of any

she could have chosen; and at my heels rode three of her servants on

great clattering cart-horses. The highway beyond the bridge rose

with a gentle slope, much obscured by trees. Between them, a short

distance up the hill, I caught sight of a lodge-gate, with a park and

a fair avenue beyond it; but of these I had no more than a glimpse,

for almost at once my lady led us off to the right and along a rutted

cart-track, black with the mould of rotted leaves, that wound up the

valley bottom and close alongside of the river. The sun was high

enough by this to pierce through the foliage of elms and alders

overhanging the stream and dapple the scarlet habit ahead of me with

pretty spots and patterns of shadow; but not yet high enough to reach

the low-lying summer-leases (as they would be called in my county)

by which the river curved. And here were cattle, yet half-awake,

heaving themselves out of their lairs to stretch themselves and begin

to browse. The war had not touched this part of the valley; and but

for a shot or two fired now and again on the distant hidden hills, we

might have deemed it a hundred miles removed. Nay, we had ridden

scarcely six furlongs before we came to an old man angling. His back

was towards us, and he did not turn to spare us so much as a look.

The cart-track, though here and there it descended close to the brink

and crossed a plashet left by the late floods, held the most of its

course partly level, and some twenty feet above the river. So we

rode for a mile, and came in sight of a second bridge, newer and more

massive than the first, for it carried one of the main highways of

the county. Here also at the confluence of two streams the valley

widened, and as we emerged on the highway out of the gloom my eyes

rested on a broad grassy park sloping up from the bridge, and crowned

with terraces and a noble house.

The entrance to this park lay but a gunshot up the road on our left;

and, coming to it, my lady drew rein.

'Your name?' she asked.

'Medhope.'

'It is singular that I should have found a gentleman,' said she, in a

musing, half-doubtful voice, as I leaned from my saddle, stifling the

pain, and unhasped the gate for her.

Said I dryly, 'The Parliament army, madam, includes a few of us.

I know not why you should press this point: and 'faith you took me

without waiting for credentials; but if it please you I am even a

poor knight of the shire.'

'My husband is fortunate,' said she; and put her horse to the trot

again.

While yet I pondered what she might mean by this--for she said it

without the ghost of a smile--we reached the house and rode into a

great empty back-court, where nevertheless was the main entrance--an

arched doorway with a broad flight of steps. Here she slipped from

her saddle, commanded me to alight, and gave my horse over to our

escort, to lead him to stable. Signing to me, she led the way up the

steps, and I followed, half-dizzy with loss of blood. The great door

stood open. We passed into a cool hall, paved with lozenges of

polished granite, white and black; and through this, with a turn to

the left, down a long corridor similarly paved and hung with

tapestries. To the right of this corridor were many doors, of which

she led me past five or six, and then pausing at one for me to

overtake her, pushed it open.

The room within was of goodly size, and flooded with the morning

sunshine that poured through three long windows. In the midst of it

stood a table laid for breakfast, and at the head of the table,

backed by a sideboard loaded with cold meats, sat a man plying

knife and fork, and with a flagon handy beside him--a heavy,

broad-shouldered man, with a copper-red complexion, and black hair

that grew extraordinarily low upon his forehead. This and a short,

heavy jaw gave him a morose, sullen look. I guessed his age at

something near thirty.

The sight of us standing in the doorway appeared to annoy him.

He scowled for a moment at my lady, and dropped his eyes, while (as

it seemed to me) a rush of angry blood suffused his face and gave it

a purplish tint; but anon lifted and fixed them on me with a stare

that as plainly as words demanded my business. My lady also turned

to me.

'This,' she said, 'is my husband, Sir Luke Glynn.' She faced about

on him. 'I have brought you here Captain Medhope, an officer of the

rebel army, to take what repayment you are ready to give. He is, I

may warn you, a good swordsman.'

Whatever she meant by this, she said it coldly, and as coldly kept

her eyes on him awaiting his answer. Still avoiding them he

continued to stare at me, and presently, pushing aside his tankard,

leaned back in his chair with a rough laugh.

'My good Kate,' said he brutally, 'I took you at least for a

sportswoman?' Still leaning back he pointed towards me.

'Your friend is hurt, wherever you found him. Better ring for Pascoe

and put him to bed.'

'Hurt?' she echoed, and turned to me, where I stood swaying, with a

hand on the table's edge, and a face (I dare say) as white as the

diapered cloth. Her eyes rested on me at first increduously, then

with dismay.

'It is not serious,' I stammered. 'If some one will set a chair for

me--no, not there--clear of the rug. My boots are full of blood, I

think.'

With this I must have fallen in a faint, straight into her arms, and

the faint must have lasted a few minutes. For when my senses came

back some one had removed my jack-boots and stockings, and a hand had

opened my shirt wide at the breast and found the wound. The hand was

Lady Glynn's; and on the other side of me stood her husband with a

goblet of wine, some of which he had managed to coax down my throat.

The wine doubtless had revived me, yet not so that I noted all this

at once or distinctly. For the while I lay back with closed eyes,

and heard--as it were in a dream--my host and hostess talking

together.

'A scratch, as you see,' said Lady Glynn. 'There is no need to send

for a surgeon--who belike would only take blood from him: and he has

lost enough already. A few hours' rest--if, when I have bathed the

wound, you and Pascoe will carry him upstairs--'

'You are considerate, truly,' he answered. 'No doubt, having hired

your bully, you wish to make the best of him. But--I put it to you--

in asking _me_ to nurse him you overshoot my Christian virtue.'

'I think not,' she corrected him in a cool, level voice. 'That is,

if you will consider him for what he is, the messenger of your

honour. For the rest, he happens to be no bully but a gentleman--

though I confess,' she added, 'this comes to you by purest luck: I

had no time to pick or choose. Lastly, I have not hired him; but--'

'But what?' he asked, as she came to a deliberate pause.

'But, if you force me to it, I may try.'

What she meant by this, I, lying between them with closed eyes, could

not guess: but I suppose that, meeting her look, he understood.

'You?' he said at length, hoarsely. 'You?' he repeated, and broke

out with a furious oath. 'No, by--, Kate, you can't mean it!

You can't--it's not like you . . . there, take your hand from him, or

I'll slit his throat, there, as he lies!'

But her hand, though it trembled, rested still on my breast, above

the wound. 'If you lay hand on him, I go straight to the King; and

if you hurt me, I have provided that a letter reaches the King.

You are trapped every way, husband; and--and let us have no violence,

please, for here comes Pascoe at last with the hot water.'

It had cost me some self-command to keep my eyes closed during this

talk. I opened them as a gray-headed servant came bustling in with a

steaming pan. For just a second they encountered Lady Glynn's.

Perhaps some irregular pulse of the heart--she had not withdrawn her

hand--or some catch in my breathing warned her in the act of turning.

She gazed down on me as if to ask how much I had heard: but almost on

the instant motioned to the old man to come close.

'Have you a sponge?' she asked.

'It is in the pan, my lady.'

She took it, rinsed it twice or thrice to make sure the water was not

too hot, and fell to bathing my wound. Her hand was exquisitely

light; the sense of the warm water delicious; and again I closed my

eyes. But in this exchange of glances my previous image of her had

somehow faded or been transformed, and with a suddenness that to this

day I cannot account for. To be sure I had formed it in haste and

amid the distractions of a pretty sharp combat. On the way to the

house she had kept well ahead--and drawn rein but to converse with me

for less than half a minute. Only once--as she came riding back

across the bridge from her parley with the patrol--had I taken stock

(as you might say) of her looks; and, even so, my eyes had been

occupied with her scarlet habit and feather, her bearing, her seat in

the saddle, and the tone in which she spoke her commands, rather than

with her actual features. That these were handsome I had certainly

noted: but that I had noted them more particularly at the time I only

discovered now, and by contrast.

Here, too, I should say that my age was forty-five and a trifle

over; and that all my life I have been (as my comrades have often

assured me) strangely insensible to the charms of women and

indifferent to their good looks; and I tell this not because I am

proud of it--for Heaven knows I am not--but that the reader may put

no misconstruction, even a passing one, upon the rest of my story.

I never for a moment stood in danger of loving Lady Glynn, as she

never for a moment stood in danger of liking me. But I pitied her;

and by virtue of this pity I was able to do for an hour or two what I

had never done before and have never since tried or wished or cared

to do again--to see clearly into a woman's mind.

But this came later. For the present, lying there while she sponged

my wound, I saw only that she was a great deal younger than I had

deemed; and not only young but in distress; and not only distressed

but in some sort helpless. In short, here was a woman so unlike the

termagant who had charged across the bridge that I could hardly

reconcile the two or believe them to be one.

The sponging over, the old man Pascoe handed her a bandage and, at a

sign from her, lifted my shoulders a little while she passed it under

my back. To do this her two arms must needs go around my body under

the shirt: and I fancy that the sight drove her husband wellnigh past

control: for he growled like a dog and I heard a splash of wine fall

on the floor from the goblet he was still holding.

He obeyed, however, and gave me his arm--albeit sulkily--when

commanded to help me upstairs: and although 'twas done on an impulse

and with no thought of mischief, I did not improve his temper by

pausing in the doorway and casting a look back at his lady. She was

kneeling by the pan, rinsing out the sponge; and with her back

towards us. She did not turn, and so my look went unrewarded; yet--

though this must have been merest fancy--her attitude strengthened my

certainty that she was in distress and in need of help.

In the great tapestried bedroom to which the two men conveyed me Sir

Luke's demeanour changed, and in a fashion at first puzzling.

Having laid me on the bed and taken my assurance that I rested

easily, he sent Pascoe off for a cup of wine and a manchet of bread,

and, while these were being fetched, hung aimlessly about the room,

now walking to and fro with his hands in his pockets, and anon

halting to stare out of window. By-and-by Pascoe brought the tray,

set it on a small table beside the bed, and retired. Sir Luke made

as if to follow him, but paused at the door, shut it, and, coming

back, stood gloomily frowning at me across the bed's foot.

'Where did my wife pick you up?' he asked.

'On the bridge,' I answered, 'where a mob--as I take it, of your

retainers--were having at me with pitchforks as a prelude to cutting

my throat.'

'Was this your first meeting?'

I opened my eyes upon him, with a lift of the brows. 'Yes,' said I

quietly, as though marvelling why he asked it. I think he had the

grace to feel abashed. At any rate he lowered his eyes; nor though

he lifted them presently did he seem able to fix them upon mine.

'You were some sort of rearguard, I suppose? They tell me the main

body of your horse rode clean through and escaped. Do you happen to

know what became of Chester?'

'Chester?' I echoed.

'He commanded our post at the bridge, as I understand. . . . When I

say "ours" 'tis from habit merely. In the early part of the campaign

I led a troop, but withdrew from His Majesty's service more than a

month ago, not being able to stomach Dick Grenville. You know Dick

Grenville?'

'By repute.'

'But not Chester? . . . Chester was at one time his led-captain: but

they have quarrelled since, and it looks as if--'

He did not finish the sentence, but left me to guess what remained.

'You mean,' said I, 'it looks as if Chester sold the pass? Well, if

he did, I know nothing about it, or about him. This is the first I

have heard of him. But speaking at a venture, I should say that

either his neck's in a halter or he has changed sides and is riding

off with our troops.'

Sir Luke nodded, but said nothing; and after a while strode to the

window. When he spoke again it was with his back turned to me.

'I wonder,' he said, 'my fellows didn't kill you out of hand.'

'They were making a plaguy near bid for it,' I answered; 'but Lady

Glynn interposed.'

'And that's the strange part of the business. All rebels, as a rule,

are poison to her. . . . As for me, you understand, a man on campaign

picks up a sort of feeling for the enemy. He gets to see that all

the right's not on one side, nor all the wrong on t'other. I dare

say, now, that your experience is much the same?' I did not answer

this and after a pause he went on, still staring out of window,

'I believed in the Lord's Anointed, for my part: but allowing, for

argument's sake, the right's on that side, there's enough villainy

and self-seeking mixed up with it to poison an honest man. . . .

I shouldn't wonder now that there's something to be said even for

Chester.'

'That hardly seems possible,' said I, wondering what his drift might

be.

'I don't know. Wait till you've heard his side of the case. . . .

But to go back to our subject--you see I don't bear you any malice: I

am out of this quarrel, and--saving my lady's obstinacy--I don't

see--I really don't see why I should billet myself with His Majesty's

prisoners. What's more, I have an estate in the east of the county,

a little this side of Plymouth. They quartered a troop of your

fellows upon it last year, and the place, I hear, is a wilderness.

. . . If I could get to it, or to Plymouth--well, one good turn

deserves another, eh?--that is, if you're fit to travel?'

I think that at this point he faced around and eyed me for the first

time. But I made show that I had dropped asleep. I heard him swear

under his breath, and half a minute later he left the room.

He had been offering me escape. But why? I turned his words over,

and the more I turned them the less I liked them. He had given me a

suspicious number of openings to prove that the right lay with my

party. It seemed to me that, on half a hint, this man meant to

desert. Yes, and his wife--I recalled her words--held him in some

trap. And yet, recalling her face, I could not shake off the fancy

that she, rather than he, stood in need of help.

Pondering all this, still with my eyes closed, I dropped asleep in

good earnest.

I awoke from a sleep of many hours, to see old Pascoe standing at the

bed's foot. No doubt his entrance had disturbed me.

He carried my boots in one hand, a can of hot water in the other, my

stockings and a clean shirt across his arm; and he announced that the

hour was four o'clock, and at half-past four Sir Luke and his lady

would be dining. If I felt myself sufficiently recovered, they

desired the pleasure of my company.

I sat upright on the bed. My head yet swam, but sleep had refreshed

me, and a pull at the wine--which had stood all this while untasted--

set me on pretty good terms with myself. I bade the old man carry my

compliments to his lady and tell her that I will thankfully do her

pleasure. 'But first,' said I, 'you must stand by and see me into a

clean shirt.'

He did more. The stab in my upper arm had bled a little, and the

shirt-sleeve could not be pulled from it without pain. He drew a

pair of scissors from his side-pocket and cut the linen away from

around the wound: and then, having noted my weakness, helped me to

wash and dress, drew on stockings and boots for me, nor left me until

he had buckled on my sword-belt, and then only with an excuse that he

must change his coat before waiting at table. Sir Luke and Lady

Glynn (he assured me) would be by this time awaiting me in the

dining-room.

Sure enough I found them there, my lady standing by the midmost

window and gazing down upon the park, Sir Luke by the fireplace with

an arm resting on the high mantel-ledge and one muddied boot jabbing

at the logs of a new-made fire till the flame roared up the chimney.

I wondered what madness could command so huge a blaze in the month of

August (albeit 'twas the last of the month), until he turned and I

saw that he had been drinking heavily.

It seemed that Lady Glynn had not heard me enter, for as I paused, a

little within the doorway, she leaned forward without turning and

pushed open a lattice of the window. I supposed that she did this to

abate the heat of the fire in the room. But no; she was leaning and

listening to the sound of guns far in the west. The sound--I had

heard it in my sleep and again at intervals while dressing--broke

heavily on the mist that damped the panes and drifted through the

opening with a breeze that set the curls waving about her neck and

puffed out the silken shawl she had drawn around her naked shoulders.

Sir Luke looked up, and was the first to catch sight of me.

'Hear the guns?' he said. 'Your foot hasn't the luck of your horse.

The King caught 'em, drove 'em back over Lestithiel Bridge, and has

been keeping 'em on the run all day, pressing 'em t'wards the coast.'

'Is that the report?' I asked.

'That's my report,' he answered; 'and'--thrusting forward one bemired

boot--'you may count on it. I've been following and watching the

fun.'

By this time Lady Glynn had turned and came past her husband to greet

me, without throwing him a look.

'You are the better for your rest?' she asked. 'At least I see that,

though wounded, you have contrived to pay me the compliment of

wearing fresh linen and a clean pair of boots.'

This was awkward, and--what was worse--she said it awkwardly, with a

sprightliness, gracious yet affected, that did not become her at all.

She meant, of course, to annoy her husband, and his face showed that

she had succeeded. He turned away to the fire with a sulky frown,

while she stood smiling, holding out a hand to me.

I touched it respectfully, and let it drop. 'The credit,' said I,

'belongs all to your servant Pascoe.'

'And here he is,' she took me up gaily, as Pascoe appeared in the

doorway. 'Is dinner ready?'

'To be served at once, my lady.'

'Then will you lead me to my seat, Captain Medhope? Yours is beside

me, on the right; yes, close there. My husband, at his end, can

enjoy the fire.'

We took our seats. I was hungry, and the dinner good. I ate of

everything, but can only recall an excellent grill of salmon and a

roast haunch of venison: the reason being that Lady Glynn kept me in

continued talk. Poor lady!--I had almost said, poor child!--for her

desperate artlessness became the more apparent to me the more she

persisted. Even I, who, as the reader has been told, have the

smallest skill in the ways of women, could see that here was one, of

high breeding but untutored, playing at a game at once above and

beneath her; almost as far above her achieving as it lay beneath her

true contempt. She knew that women can inveigle men; but in the

practice of it I am very sure that her dairymaid could have given her

lessons.

But what am I saying? Her poor coquetries did not deceive me, but

she never meant them to deceive me. They accomplished, after all,

just that for which she intended them. They deceived and maddened

her half-drunken lout of a husband. Her dress, too, was something

shameless. She wore above her scarlet skirt (which I verily believe

was the same she had ridden in) a bodice of the same bright colour,

low as a maid-of-honour's, that displayed her young neck and bust.

About her neck she had fastened a string of garnets. She had loaded

her fingers with old-fashioned rings, of which the very dullness made

me wince to see them employed in this sorry service. And I guessed

that before my entrance this unusual finery had provoked her husband

to fury.

A length of table lay between us and him. He sat silent, regarding

us under lowered brows, eating little, draining glass after glass.

Angry though he was, her voice seemed to lay a spell on him.

She talked of a thousand things, but especially of the Parliament

campaign, plying me with question after question--of our numbers, our

discipline, our hardships during the past three weeks, of our

general's plan of escape, and, in particular, of the part I had borne

in it. And when I answered she listened with smiles, as though King

and Parliament lay balanced in her affections. And this was the

termagant that a few hours ago had ridden us down and trampled across

poor Hutson's body!

All this I took at its true value, answering her with steady

politeness, telling myself that as her purpose was to goad her

husband, so no word of mine should give him an excuse for an

outbreak. It takes two to make a quarrel, they say. But when three

are mixed up in it (and one a woman), the third cannot always count

on remaining passive.

I had managed to tide over the meal with fair success. We had

reached the dessert, and Pascoe (whose presence may have laid some

restraint upon his master) had withdrawn. A dish of pears lay before

Lady Glynn, and she asked me to peel one for her. I know not if this

simple request laid the last straw on Sir Luke's endurance, but he

filled his glass again and said with brutal insolence,--

'You are fortunate, Captain Medhope, in exciting my wife's interest.

I assure you that until your gallantry bewitched her, she had been

used to speak of all rebels as cowards in grain.'

'I hope, Sir Luke,' said I, 'you, with experience of us, have tried

to teach her better.'

'In faith, no,' he replied yet more brutally, backing his sneer with

a laugh. 'I saw no reason for that.'

'And yet,' said I deliberately, peeling my pear, 'you told me to-day

that something might be said even for such a man as your friend

Chester.'

He jumped up with an oath. Yet I believe he might even now have

restrained himself had not his wife--and with a face as pale as a

ghost's--laid a hand on my arm.

'I had forgotten your wound,' she said, ignoring her husband.

'You handle the knife awkwardly. Let me cut the fruit and we will

share.'

With a turn of the hand Sir Luke hurled back his chair, and it fell

with a crash.

'By God, Kate! if you have hired this man, he shall murder first and

do his love-making afterwards. Nay, but I'll stop that, too.

Look first to yourself, madame!'

He had whipped out his sword and was actually running upon her before

I could get mine clear. But I was in time to beat down his point and

then--for he was slow-witted and three-parts drunk--with a trick of

wrist that luckily required little strength, I disarmed him.

His sword struck the farther edge of the table, smashed a decanter of

wine and dropped to the floor.

We were standing now, all three; Lady Glynn a little behind my elbow.

'Are you going to kill him?' she asked, and he heard.

For a moment he stared at her stupidly, then at the stream of wine

running across the table, then back at her--and, so staring, flung up

both hands and plunged forward. His brow, as he fell like an ox,

thudded against the chair from which, a moment since, she had arisen.

I caught up a candle. But she was before me and had dropped on her

knees beside him. In his fall he had rolled over on his side, and

for a moment I supposed her to be busy loosening his collar.

But no--as I held the candle close she was feeling in his pockets,

and in the light of it she held up a bunch of keys.

'I am glad you did not kill him,' she said simply, rising from her

knees. 'There was no need.'

'No need?' I repeated stupidly, swaying with weakness.

'You shall see.'

She slipped by me and from the room. I bent and loosened Sir Luke's

collar, and essayed to lift him, but had to relinquish the effort and

drop into a chair, where I sat staring at the fallen wreck. While I

stared, still dizzy, I heard the voice of old Pascoe behind me.

'We can manage it, sir--I think--between us.' He stepped past me,

and together we lifted his master and staggered with him to a couch,

where he lay, breathing hard.

Pascoe motioned me back to my chair, where I sat and panted.

While I sat, she came back. I did not hear her approach, but only

her voice whispering to me to come: and I followed her forth from the

room and out into the corridor, and along the corridor to the porch

as a man walking in his sleep.

There was a lantern by the porch, and in the light of it my horse

stood, saddled and ready.

'You will take the road up the valley,' she said, 'and cross by the

second bridge. The road beyond that bears due east and is

unguarded.'

'But what is this?' I asked, as I put a hand to the pommel of the

saddle and felt something hard and heavy slung there beside it.

'It is the price of the pass, or half of it. There is another bag on

the off side, and between them they hold, I believe, six hundred

pounds.'

'That was his price?'

'That was the price. And now go: take it back to your general.'

'You must help me to mount,' said I.

She helped me to mount.

'The second bridge, you will remember,' said she, as I found my

stirrups.

'I will remember. Is that all?'

'That is all: though, if you wish it, I will thank you and say that

you have behaved well.'

'I did not wish it,' said I, 'though now you have said it, I am glad.

You hate me, I understand.'

'And I thank you for understanding. Yes, you have behaved well.'

'Good-night, then, and God bless you!'

I shook rein and jogged out of the courtyard into the mirk and mist.

I never saw her again.

Not till years later did I learn that she, too, had left her

husband's roof that night and after (it cannot be doubted) many

adventures of which no history has reached me, joined the Court in

its exile at the Hague; where, as I am told, she died.

Her husband recovered and lived to accomplish his end by drink.

There were whispers against him, but no certain proof that he had

ever acted as intermediary in selling the pass. His defenders could

always urge his notorious poverty. Before his death he had parted

with more than two-thirds of his estate. There was no child to

inherit the remainder.

To the end he asserted that his wife had run from him unfaithfully,

and was pitied for it. So I hear, at least, and do not care; as I am

sure she would not have cared. She had saved his honour, with my

poor help, and having saved it, was quit of us both.

I pray the foreign earth may rest lightly on her.

THE JEW ON THE MOOR.

[The scene is the kitchen of a small farm-house above the Walkham

River, on the western edge of Dartmoor. The walls, originally of

rough granite, have had their asperities smoothed down by many layers

of whitewash. The floor is of lime-ash, nicely sanded. From the

ceiling--formed of rude, unplaned beams and the planching of the

bedroom above--depends a rack crowded with hams and sides of bacon,

all wrapped in newspapers. In the window a dozen geraniums are

blooming, and beyond them the eye rests on the slope of Sharpitor and

the distant ridge of Sheepstor. The fireplace, which faces the

window, is deep and capacious, and floored with granite slabs.

On these burns a fire of glowing peat, and over the fire hangs a

crock of milk in process of scalding. In the ingle behind it sits

the relator of this story, drying his knees after a Dartmoor shower.

From his seat he can look up the wide chimney and see, beyond the

smoke, the sky, and that it is blue again and shining. But he

listens to the farmer's middle-aged sister, who stands at the table

by the window, and rolls out a pie-crust as she talks. (The farmer

is a widower, and she keeps house for him.) She talks of a small

picture--a silhouette executed in black and gold--that adorns the

wall-space between the dresser and the tall clock, and directly above

the side-table piled with the small library of the house.

The portrait is a profile of a young man, somewhat noticeably

handsome, in a high-necked coat and white stock collar.]

'It is none of our family, though it came to us near on a hundred

years ago. It came from America. A young gentleman sent it over

from Philadelphia to my grandmother, with a letter to say he was

married and happy, and would always remember her. Perhaps he did;

and, again, perhaps he didn't. That was the last my grandmother

heard of him.

'But it wasn't made in America. It was made in the War Prison, over

yonder at Princetown, where they keep the convicts now. I've heard

the man that drew and cut it out was a French sergeant, with only one

arm. He had lost the other in the war, and his luck was to be left

until the very last draft. He finished it the morning he was

released, and he gave it to the young American--Adams, his name was--

for a keepsake. The Americans had to stay behind, because their war

wasn't over yet.

'It came to my grandmother in this way: She was married to my

grandfather that owned this very farm, and lived in this very house;

and twice a week she would drive over to the prison, to the market

that used to be held there every day from before noon till nightfall.

Sometimes my grandfather drove with her, but oftener not. She could

take care of herself very well.

'She sold poultry and pork, eggs and butter, and vegetables; lard

sometimes, and straw, with other odds and ends. (The prisoners used

the straw for plaiting bonnets.) Scores of salesmen used to travel to

the prison every day, from Tavistock, Okehampton, Moreton, and all

around the Moor: Jews, too, from Plymouth, with slop-clothing.

But in all this crowd my grandmother held her own. The turnkeys knew

her; the prisoners liked her for her good looks and good temper, and

because she always dealt fair; and the agent (as they called the

governor in those days) had given orders to set aside a table and

trestles for her twice a week, close inside the entrance of the

market square, on the side where the bettermost French prisoners

lived in a building they called the Petty Caution.

'But with the prisoners, though many a time her heart melted for

them, she was always very careful, and let it be known that she never

smuggled tobacco or messages even for her best customers. After a

while they got to understand this, and (though you may think it

queer) liked her none the less. The agent, on his part, trusted

her--and the turnkeys and the military officials--and didn't respect

her the less because she never told tales, though they knew she might

have told many.

'This went on, staid and regular, for close upon three years; and

then, one fine October evening, my grandmother, after reaching home

with her little cart, unharnessing and bedding up the donkey in his

stable, walked out to the orchard, where my grandfather was looking

over his cider apples, and says she to him,--

'"William, I've a-done a dreadful deed."

'My grandfather took off his hat, and rubbed the top of his head.

"Good Lord!" he says. "You don't tell me!"

'"I've helped a prisoner to escape," says she.

'"Then we'm lost and done for," says my grandfather. "How did it

come about?" And with that he waited a little, and said, "Damme, my

dear, if any other person had brought me this tale I'd have tanned

his skin." For I must tell you my grandfather and grandmother doted

on one another.

'"I know you would," said my grandmother, dismally. "And I can't

think how the temptation took me. But the poor creatur' was little

more'n a boy--and there were a-something in the eyes of him--"

She meant to say there was a-something that reminded her of her own

eldest, that she had lost a dozen years before.

'I don't know whether my grandfather understood or whether he didn't.

But all he said was, "However did you contrive it?"

'"It came," she said, "of my takin' they six white rabbits to market.

I sold mun all; and when they were sold, and the hutch standin'

empty--" My grandmother pulled out her handkerchief and dabbed her

eyes.

'"You drove him out in the rabbit hutch?" asked my grandfather.

'"With a handful of straw between him and the bars," she owned.

"He's nobbut a boy. You can't think how easy. And the look of him

when he crep' inside--"

'"Where is he?" asked my grandfather.

'"Somewheres hangin' about the stable at this moment," she told him,

with a kind o' sob.

'So my grandfather went out to the back. He could not find the

prisoner in the stable, but by-and-by he caught sight of him on the

slope of the stubble field behind it. The poor lad had taken a hoe,

and was pretending to work it, while he edged away in the dimmety

light.

'"Hallo!" sings out my grandfather across the gate; and goes striding

up the field to him. "If I were you," says he, "I wouldn't hoe

stubble; because that's a new kind of agriculture in these parts, and

likely to attract notice."

'"I was doin' my best," twittered the prisoner. He was a

delicate-lookin' lad, very white just now about the gills.

"I come from Marblehead," he explained, "and, bein' bred to the sea,

I didn't think it would matter."

'"It will, you'll find, if you persevere with it. But come indoors.

We'll stow you in the cider-loft for to-night, after you've taken a

bite of supper. And to-morrow--well, I'll have to think that out,"

said my grandfather.

'For the next few hours he felt pretty easy. He and his wife had a

good reputation with the agent, who would take a long time before

suspecting them of any hand in an escape. The three ate their supper

together in good comfort, though from time to time my grandfather

pricked up his ears as though he heard the sound of a gun. But the

wind blew from the south-west that night, and if a gun was fired the

sound did not carry.

'When supper was done my grandmother made a suggestion that the lad,

instead of turning out to the cider-loft, should sleep in the garret

overhead; and my grandfather, after a look at the lad's face, shut

his lips, and would not gainsay her, though--as in bed he couldn't

help reminding her--it would be difficult to pass off a visitor in

the garret, with two blankets, for a housebreaker.

'As it happened, though, they were not disturbed that night. But my

grandfather, for thinking, took a very little sleep, and in the

morning he went up to the garret with the best plan he could devise.

'"I've been turnin' it over," he said, "and there's no road will help

you across the Moor for days to come. You must bide here till the

hue-an'-cry has blown over, and meantime the missus must fit up some

disguise for you; but you must bide in bed, for a man can't step out

o' this house, front or back, without bein' visible from all the tors

around. So rest where you be, and I'll just dander down along

t'wards Walkhampton, where the Plymouth road runs under Sharpitor,

an' where I've been meanin' to break up a taty-patch this long time

past. There's alway a plenty goin' and comin' 'pon the road, an'

maybe by keepin' an eye open I'll learn what line the chase is

takin'."

'So my grandfather shouldered his biddick and marched off, down and

across the valley, marked off his patch pretty high on the slope, and

fell to work. Just there he could keep the whole traffic of the road

under his eye, as well as the fields around his house; and for a

moment it gave him a shock as he called to mind that in the only

field that lay out of sight he'd left a scarecrow standing--in a

patch that, back in the summer, he had cropped with pease for the

agent's table up at the War Prison. To be sure, 'twasn't likely to

mislead a search-party, and, if it did, why a scarecrow's a

scarecrow; but my grandfather didn't like the thought of any of these

gentry being near the house. If they came at all they might be

minded to search further. So he determined that when dinner-time

came he would go back home and take the scarecrow down.

'The road (as I said) was always pretty full of traffic, coming and

going between Plymouth and the War Prison. There were bakers'

wagons, grocery vans, and vans of meat, besides market carts from

Bickleigh and Buckland. My grandfather watched one and another go

by, but made out nothing unusual until--and after he had been digging

for an hour, maybe--sure enough he spied a mounted soldier coming up

the road at a trot, and knew that this must be one of the searchers

returning. In a minute more he recognised the man for an

acquaintance of his, a sergeant of the garrison, and by name

Grimwold, and hailed him as he came close.

'"Hallo! Is that you?" says the sergeant, reining up. "And how long

might you have been workin' there?"

'"Best part of an hour," says my grandfather. "What's up?"

'"There's a prisoner escaped, another o' those damned Yankees," says

the sergeant. "I've been laying the alarm all the way to Plymouth.

You ha'n't seen any suspicious-lookin' party pass this way, I

suppose?"

'My grandfather said very truthfully that he hadn't, but promised

very truthfully that he would keep an eye lifting. So the sergeant

wished him good-day and rode on towards Two Bridges.

'For the next twenty minutes nothing passed but a tax-cart and a

market woman with a donkey; and a while after them a very

queer-looking figure hove in sight.

''Twas a man walking, with a great sack on his shoulders and two or

three hats on his head, one atop of another. By the cut of his jib,

as they say, my grandfather knew him at once for one of the Plymouth

Jews, that visited Princetown by the dozen with cast-off clothes for

sale, and silver change for the gold pieces that found their way

sometimes into the prison as prize-money. Sometimes, too, they

carried away the Bank of England notes that the Frenchmen were so

clever at forging. But though, as he came near, the man had Jew

written all over him, my grandfather couldn't call to mind that he'd

ever seen this particular Jew before.

'What is more, it was plain enough in a minute that the Jew didn't

recognise my grandfather; for, catching sight of him aloft there on

the slope, first of all he gave a start, next he walked forward a few

steps undecided-like, and last he pulled up, set down his bundle like

a man tired, and looked behind him down the road. The road was

empty, so he turned his attention to my grandfather, and after

looking at him very curiously for half a minute, "Good-morning," says

he.

'By this time my grandfather had guessed what was passing in the

man's mind, and it came into his own to have a little fun.

'"Good-morning, stranger," said he, through his nose, mimicking so

well as he could the American manner of speaking.

'"How long have you been at work there, my man?" asks the Jew, still

glancing up and down the road.

'"A long time," answers my grandfather, putting on a scared look, and

halting in his words. "This piece of ground belongs to me"--which

was true enough, but didn't sound likely; for he was always a

careless man in his dress (the only matter over which he and my

grandmother had words now and then), and to-day, feeling he had the

whip-hand of her, he had taken advantage to wear an old piece of

sacking in place of a coat.

'"Oh, indeed," says the Jew, more than dubious, and thinking, no

doubt, of the three guineas that was the regular reward for taking an

escaped prisoner.

'"It's the tarnal truth," says my grandfather, and fell to whistling,

like a man facing it out. But the tune he chose was "Yankee Doodle!"

This, of course, made the Jew dead sure of his man. But he was a

lean little wisp of a man, and my grandfather too strongly built to

be tackled. So the pair stood eyeing one another until, glancing up,

my grandfather saw three soldiers come round the corner of the road

from Plymouth, and with that he dropped his biddick and turned like a

desperate man.

'The Jew saw them too, and almost upon the same instant.

"Help, help!" he yelled, and leaving his bag where he had dropped it,

tore down the road to meet the soldiers, waving both arms and still

shouting, "Help! A prisoner! A prisoner!"

'My grandfather always said afterwards that, when he heard this, he

fairly groaned. He wasn't by any means humorous as a rule, and, so

far as he was concerned, the joke had gone far enough; and he used to

add as a warning that a man may go so far in a joke he can't help but

go farther--'tis like hysterics with women. At any rate, he saw the

soldiers coming for him at the double, spreading themselves to head

him off, and as they came he broke and ran straight up the slope

towards the head of the tor.

'This violent exercise didn't suit him at all, and glad enough he

was, after two minutes of it, to note that the soldiers were

shortening the distance hand over fist. For a moment he had a mind

to drop, as though worn out with hunger and exhaustion, but his face

and shape wouldn't lend themselves to that deceit. So he held on and

did his best, until the foremost soldier drew within thirty yards and

shouted out, threatening to fire. Turning and seeing that he had his

musket almost at the "present," my grandfather dropped his arms,

stood still, and allowed them to take him like a lamb.

'"But," said he, sulky-like, "if 'tis to the prison you mean to carry

me, then carry me you shall. Back to the road I'll go with you, but

not a step farther on my own legs, and on that you may bet your last

dollar."

'The soldiers--they were three raw youngsters of the Somerset

Militia--threatened at first to prick him along the road with their

bayonets. But by this time the little Jew had come up panting and

yet almost capering with excitement.

'"No bloodthed!" said he, in his lisping way. "I'll have no

bloodthed! The man 'ith worth three guineath to me ath he ith.

He thall have a cart, if it cotht me five shillingth! Where 'th the

nearetht village?"

'He ran off and down the road, while my grandfather sat down on the

turf along with the soldiers, and smoked a pipe of tobacco.

Very nice lads they were, too; but he felt shy in their company,

thinking how badly he had deceived them, and also that the joke was

near running dry. For, whatever cart the Jew might hire, the driver

couldn't help recognising a man so widely known as my grandfather.

'But his luck stood yet. For the little man hadn't run above

three-quarters of a mile on the road and was not half-way towards

Buckland--his nearest chance of a cart--when he came full tilt upon a

light wagon and three more soldiers, with a fourth riding behind, and

all conveying the prisoners' weekly pocket-money up to Princetown, in

sacks filled with small change. Here was a chance to save breath as

well as carriage hire, and the little Jew charged down on them so

fiercely, as they crawled up the hill, that the corporal who sat on

the money with a musket across his knees, had nearly shot him for a

highwayman before giving him time to explain.

'They whipped up the horses though, when they heard his story; and

so, coming to the road under Sharpitor, and halting, they very soon

had my grandfather trussed and laid upon the bags of money, and

jogged away with him towards the Two Bridges, the Jew and three

militiamen tramping behind at the cart-tail.

'It was one o'clock, or a little past, when they drove up to the

prison gate; and a mist beginning to gather above North Hessary, as

at this time of year it often does after a clear morning.

My grandfather, looking out from under the tilt of the cart, felt as

he'd never felt before what a cheerless place it must seem to a

new-comer, and his heart melted a little bit further towards the lad

he was hiding at home.

'"Hallo!" says the sentry at the gate.

'"You'll say something more than Hallo! when you see what we've got

inside here," promised the corporal.

'Then they bundled my grandfather out in the light of day, and the

corporal proudly told the sentry to summon the agent at once.

'"Good Lord!" said the sentry, "if it bain't Farmer Mugford!"

'Just then, as it happened, forth stepped the agent himself from the

wicket, starting for his walk that he took for his health's sake

every afternoon. Captain Sharpland his name was, and later on, when

the Americans mutinied, he was accused of treating them harshly, but

my grandfather said that a kinder-hearted man never stepped.

'"Hallo," says Captain Sharpland, halting and putting up his

eyeglass. "Why, Mugford, whatever is the meaning of this?"

'"You'd best ask the Jew here, sir," my grandfather answered, nursing

his sulks.

'"If you pleathe, noble captain," put in the Jew, who didn't yet

guess anything amiss, "we've thecured the ethcaped prithoner--after a

tuthle--"

'"And pray, who the devil may you be?" asked Captain Sharpland,

screwing his eyeglass into his eye. He disliked Jews, upon

principle.

'"Tho pleathe you, noble captain, my name 'th Nathan Nathaniel, of

Thouththide Thtreet, Plymouth: and on my way thith morning, ath you

thee, I came on the prithoner--"'

'"Prisoner be--" began Captain Sharpland, but broke off to swear at

the sentry, that was covering his face with his hands to hide his

grins. "My good Mr Mugford, will _you_ explain?"

'"With pleasure, sir," my grandfather answered, and told his story,

while the Jew's eyes grew wider and wider, and his jaw dropped lower

and lower.

'"You claim compensation, of course?" said Captain Sharpland at the

close, and as gravely as he could, though he too had to smooth a hand

over his upper lip.

'"Why, as for that, sir"--my grandfather was taken aback--"I took it

for a joke, and bear no grudge against Government for it."

'"It wouldn't help you if you did," said Captain Sharpland. "But I

suggest that Mr Nathan, here, owes you a trifle--shall we put it at

twenty pounds?"

'But here Mr Nathan cast up his hands with a scream, and would have

sat down in the roadway. The soldiers caught him, and held him

upright, and you may guess if, in their temper at being fooled, they

twisted his arms a bit.

'"Take him to my quarters, and we will discuss it," commanded Captain

Sharpland, turning back to the wicket again, and leading the way.

Well, the Jew, when he reached the agent's quarters, rolled on to his

knees, and whined so long, beating down the price, that 'twas well

after four o'clock before he counted out the five guineas which was

the least sum Captain Sharpland would hear of. My grandfather

counted them into his pocket, scarcely believing his good fortune.

He stayed behind after the creature had slunk away out of the room--

to have a laugh with the captain, who very heartily offered him a

glass of grog upon the top of it; and with that it came over him how

he was deceiving this good man. He couldn't accept the drink; he

could scarcely muster up face to say "Good-night, sir, and thank

you," and if he, too, as he went out, didn't carry his tail between

his legs, I doubt if he felt much better satisfied with himself than

did Mr Nathan.

'But just outside the gate he found something to distract his mind.

The soldiers, in a rage at being made to look foolish, had been

waiting there for Mr Nathan with their belts; and my grandfather

arrived in time to hear the wretched man howling for mercy, as they

chevied him away over the moor under the lee of North Hessary and

into the dusk.

'He stood and listened for a minute or so, but by-and-by there was an

end of the yells, and the soldiers came strolling back, laughing

together, as men who had taken a pleasant little revenge but not

pushed it too far. So he turned his face for home, and reached it a

little after nightfall; and there he turned out his pocket in front

of my grandmother, who could not believe a word of the tale until she

had handled each guinea separately. Then she, too, flung her apron

over her head, and laughed till she was weak. But my grandfather

wanted to know if by rights he oughtn't to share the money with the

prisoner.

'My grandmother couldn't make up her mind about this, and advised him

to sleep on it. The young man (she said) had faithfully kept his bed

all day, but was growing resty. So my grandfather, before supping,

took a light and went upstairs to the garret.

'"We've kept the scent wide to-day," he reported, very cheerful-like.

"But you'll have to lie still for a while yet."

'"Lyin' here puts a strain on a man," the lad grumbled. "Couldn't I

take a turn in the fields, now that dark has fallen? I'd promise not

to stray far from the house."

'"That's a notion," my grandfather agreed. "I once had to lie in bed

two days with a quinsy, and I hated it." He considered for a while,

and could see no objection. "Come down and sup with us," he said;

"and afterwards, if the missus agrees, you can take a stroll.

But don't make too much noise when you let yourself in again."

'Well, so it was fixed; and after supper the lad put on a pair of

high-lows my grandfather lent him, and started off for a ramble in

the night air, with a plenty of instructions about the safest paths.

At nine o'clock, which was their regular hour, my grandfather and

grandmother made out the light and went to bed, leaving the door on

the latch. It was an hour before my grandfather could get to sleep.

He was thinking of the five guineas, and how they ought rightfully to

be divided.

'At five in the morning his wife woke him, and declared that in her

belief the lad was still abroad. If he had returned and gone to his

garret she must have heard; but she had heard nothing. She harped on

this till my grandfather climbed out and went to the garret for a

look; and sure enough the bed was empty.

'They lay awake till daylight, the pair of them, cogitating this and

that. But when the dawn came, my grandfather could stand it no

longer. He pulled on his breeches and boots, went downstairs, and

had scarcely thrown open the door before he heard screams and saw a

wretched figure, naked to the shirt, running across the yard towards

the house. It was Nathan the Jew, and he tumbled in front of my

grandfather, and caught hold of him by the boots while he yelled for

mercy.

'What do you suppose, was the explanation? My grandfather could

scarcely make head or tail of it, even after listening to the Jew's

story. And neither he nor my grandmother ever set eyes on the

prisoner lad again. But about nine months later there came a letter

from America that helped to clear things up.

'The poor boy--so he wrote in his letter--being turned loose under

the sky after fifteen months of captivity, just couldn't go back to

the garret. Though the night was pitch black and full of mist, and

the stars hidden, he wanted no more than to pace to and fro, and look

up and open his chest to it. To and fro he went, a bit farther each

time, but always keeping my grandfather's directions somewhere at the

back of his mind, and always searching back till he could see the

glimmer of whitewash showing him where the house stood. In the

letter he sent to my grandmother he told very freely of the thoughts

that came to him there while he felt his way back and forth; and to a

staid woman that had never been shut up behind bars the writing--or

the most of it--was mad enough. "Liberty! Liberty!" it kept saying:

and "good though it was, how much better if he'd been able to see

just one star through the fog!"

'By little and little he stretched his tether so far, forgetting how

the time went, that the dawn overtook him a good half-mile from the

house; and through the gray of it he caught sight of a man standing

about fifty yards away, and right in his path. He turned to run, and

then his heart almost jumped out of his mouth as he saw another man

standing to catch him with arms held wide!

'But what had happened was, he had strayed into the pea-patch and

the figure with its arms stretched out was no man at all, but a

scarecrow. The lad had no sooner made sure of this than he whipped

behind it, stretched out his hands upon the cross-trees that served

it for arms, and clung there, praying.

'Now the man creeping down the field was Nathan the Jew. He had been

wandering the Moor all night, crazy with terror; and when the dawn

showed him a house, he could have turned Christian and dropped on his

knees. But casting a glance over his shoulder as he ran towards it,

he caught sight of the scarecrow. For a second or two he ran faster,

believing it to be either a man or a ghost. He took another glance

back and came to a halt.

'He knew it now for a scarecrow. He stood, and he stood, and he eyed

it.

'The scarecrow had a suit of clothes that was all tatters, and an old

beaver hat. It was the hat that took Nathan's fancy. Beaver hats

cost a deal of money in those days: but they had a knack of lasting,

and Nathan had scarcely ever met with one, however old, that he

couldn't sell for a few pence. For a minute or so he stood there,

letting his sense of business get the better of his fright; then he

swallowed down the last doubt sticking in his throat, walked straight

up to the scarecrow, and made a grab at the hat.

'"Leave my head alone, can't you?" said the scarecrow. And with that

Mr Nathan dropped in a fit; yet not so quick but that before dropping

he caught a straight blow full on the jaw.

'When he came to, his coat was gone, and his bag, and his hats,

including the scarecrow's. But the rest of the scarecrow stood over

him, with its arms stretched out just as before; and he picked

himself up and ran from it.

'As for the lad, by this time he had made the best of two miles

towards Plymouth. In his letter he apologised very prettily to my

grandmother for not saying good-bye. He owed his life to her, he

said; but being taken unawares he had done the best he could in the

circumstances.'

MY CHRISTMAS BURGLARY.

[_From the Memoirs of a Pierrot_.]

I had come with high expectations, for Mr Felix, a bachelor of

sixty-five, was reputed to have made for thirty years this particular

cabinet his idol. Any nabob or millionaire can collect. Mr Felix,

being moderately well to do, had selected. He would have none but

the best; and the best lay stored delicately on cotton-wool, ticketed

with the tiniest handwriting, in a nest of drawers I could have

unlocked with a hairpin.

The topmost drawer contained scarabs (of which I am no connoisseur);

the second some two dozen intaglios, and of these, by the light of my

bull's-eye lantern, I examined five or six before sweeping the lot

into my bag--Europa and the Bull, Ganymede in the eagle's claw, Agave

carrying the head of Pentheus, Icarus with relaxed wing dropping

headlong to a sea represented by one wavy line; each and all

priceless. In the third drawer lay an unset emerald, worth a king's

ransom, a clasp of two amethysts, and a necklace of black pearls

graduated to a hair's-breadth. By this time I could see--I read it

even in the exquisite parsimony of the collection--that I had to deal

with an artist, and sighed that in this world artists should prey

upon one another. The fourth drawer was reserved for miniatures, the

most of them circleted with diamonds: the fifth for snuff-boxes-gold

snuffboxes bearing royal ciphers, snuff-boxes of tortoise-shell and

gold, snuff-boxes of blue enamel set with diamonds. A couple of

these chinked together as they dropped into the bag. The sound

startled me, and I paused for a moment to look over my shoulder.

The window stood open as I had left it. Outside, in the windless

frosty night, the snow on the house-roofs sparkled under a wintering

moon now near the close of her first quarter. But though the night

was windless, a current of air poured into the room, and had set a

little flame dancing in the fireplace where, three minutes ago, the

sea-coals had held but a feeble glow, half-sullen. Downstairs, in

some distant apartment, fiddles were busy with a waltz tune,

and a violoncello kept the beat with a low thudding pizzicato.

For Mr Felix was giving a Christmas party.

I turned from this hasty glance to pick up another snuff-box.

As my fingers closed on it the music suddenly grew louder, and I

looked up as the door opened, and a man stood on the threshold--a

short, square-set man, dressed in black.

'Eh?' He gave a little start of surprise. 'No, no, excuse me, my

friend, but you are seeking in the wrong cabinet.'

Before I could pull myself together, he had stepped to the window and

closed it. 'You had best keep quite still,' he said, 'and then we

can talk. There are servants on the stairs below, and should you

attempt the way you came there are three constables just around the

corner. I hired them to regulate the carriage traffic: but now that

the last guest has arrived, they will be cooling their heels for a

spell; and I have a whistle. I have also a pistol.' With a turn of

his hand he flung open a door in a dark armoire beside the window,

dived a hand into its recesses, and produced the weapon. 'And it is

loaded,' he added, still in the same business-like voice, in which,

after his first brief exclamation, my ear detected no tremor.

'By all means let us talk,' I said.

He was crossing to the fireplace, but wheeled about sharply at the

sound of my voice. 'Eh? An educated man, apparently!' Laying the

pistol on the mantelshelf, he plucked a twisted spill of paper from a

vase hard by, stooped, ignited it from the flame dancing in the

sea-coals, and proceeded to light the candles in an old-fashioned

girandole that overhung the fireplace. There were five candles, and

he lit them all.

They revealed him a clean-shaven, white-haired man, meticulously

dressed in black--black swallowtail coat, open waistcoat, and frilled

shirt-front, on which his laundress must have spent hours of labour;

closely fitting black knee-breeches, black silk stockings, black

polished shoes. They silhouetted, too, in the moment before he swung

round on me, an enormous nose, like a punchinello's, and the outline

of a shapely head, sufficiently massive to counterbalance and save it

from caricature. The size of the head again would have suggested

deformity, but for the broad shoulders that carried it. As he faced

me squarely with his back to the hearth, his chest and shoulders

narrowing to the hips of a runner, and still narrowing (though he

stood astraddle) to ankles and feet that would not have disgraced a

lady, he put me in mind of a matador I had seen years before, facing

his bull in the ring at Seville. The firelight behind them

emphasised the neat outline of his legs. He carried a black cloak on

his left arm, and in his left hand an opera-hat, pressed flat against

his left side. In closing the window, in finding and producing the

pistol, and again in lighting the candles, he had used his right hand

only.

'A gentleman?' he asked, contracting his brows and eyeing me.

'Well,' said I, with an uncomfortable, nervous laugh, that itself

accused my breeding, so inferior it was to the situation, 'possibly

you are one of those who mix up the name with moral conduct--'

'To some extent,' he answered, without seeming to interrupt.

'Every one does, I fancy.'

'At any rate I won't challenge it,' said I. 'But you may, if you

will, call me a man of some education. I was at Magdalen once, but

left Oxford without taking my degree.'

'Ah!' He inclined his head a little to one side. 'Cards?'

'Certainly not,' I answered with heat. 'I own that appearances are

against me, but I was never that kind of man. As a matter of fact,

it happened over a horse.'

He nodded. 'So you, too, though you won't challenge the name, have

to mix up moral conduct with your disposition. We draw the line

variously, but every one draws it somewhere. . . . Magdalen, hey?

If I mistake not, the foundationers of Magdalen--including, perhaps,

some who were undergraduates with you--are assembled in the college

hall at this moment to celebrate Christmas, and hear the choir sing

Pergolese's "Gloria."'

'The reminder hurts me,' said I--'if that be any gratification to

you.'

'A sentimentalist?' Mr Felix's eyes twinkled.

'Better and better! I have the very job for you--but we will discuss

that by-and-by. Only let me say that you must have dropped on me,

just now, from heaven--you really must. But please don't make a

practice of it! I have invested too much in my curios; and others

have invested more. . . . That snuff-box, for instance, which you

were handling a moment ago . . . at one time in its history it cost--

ay, and fetched--close on two hundred millions of money.'

I began to have hopes that I was dealing with a madman.

'Or rather,' he corrected himself, 'the money was paid for a pinch of

the snuff it contains. Open it carefully, if you please! and you

will behold the genuine rappee, the very particles over which France

fought with Austria. What says Virgil? '_Hi motus animorum atque

heac cerlamina tanta Pulveris exigui jactu_'--yes, but in this

instance, you see, the pinch of dust was the exciting cause.

Sir, the Austrian ambassador, one fatal afternoon, refused to take

from the box in your hand that which, three weeks later, and all too

late, he would gladly have purchased with many millions. Observe the

imperial crown on the lid, with the bees around it, as if to

illustrate Virgil's warning. I bought the thing myself, sir, for six

napoleons, off a dealer in the Rue du Fouarre: but the price will

rise again. Yes, certainly, I count on its fetching three hundred

pounds at least when I have departed this life, and three hundred

pounds will go some little way towards my monument.'

'Your monument?' I echoed.

He nodded again. 'In good time, my friend, you shall hear about it;

for you make, I perceive, a good listener. You have gifts, though

you do less than justice to them. Suffice it to say that I am a

sentimentalist, like yourself. I never married nor begat children;

and I have but a shaky belief in the future state; but my

sentimentality hankers after--you may even say it postulates--some

kind of continuity. I cannot discuss this here and now, for by the

sound of the violins, the dance is coming to an end, and my guests

will be growing impatient. But you remember Samson's riddle?

Well, out of my corpse (I trust) shall come forth honey: whereas out

of yours, unless you employ your talents better--' He broke off, and

stepped close up to me. 'Ah, but excuse me,' he said, and reaching

out a hand, caught me suddenly by the collar.

The arrest--I made sure it was an arrest--took me unprepared, and

threw me off my balance. I broke away a pace, drawing back my fist

to strike: and in that moment I felt his hand relax with a curious

fluttering movement as though his fingers drummed on the back of my

neck. I heard him laugh too: and before I could hit out he sprang

back, holding in his hand a white rabbit!

'An old trick--eh?--and a simple one.' He pressed out the spring of

his opera hat, dropped the rabbit inside, dived his hand after it,

and drew out two white rabbits by the ears. 'But it will amuse my

young friends downstairs, and I practise this kind of thing at odd

whiles.'

He set the rabbits on the floor, where they gave themselves a shake,

and hopped off towards the shelter of the window-curtains.

'Now you are the very man I wanted,' said he, 'and I am going to make

you sing for your supper.' He stepped to the armoire, and drew out a

long cloak of scarlet, furred with ermine. 'I had meant to wear this

myself,' he went on; but stopped all of a sudden at sight of my face,

and began to laugh quietly, in a way that made me long to take him by

the throat. 'Dear me, dear me! I understand! Association of

ideas--Court of Assize, eh? But this is no judicial robe, my friend:

it belongs to Father Christmas. Here's his wig now--quite another

sort of wig, you perceive--with a holly wreath around it. And here's

his beard, beautifully frosted with silver.' He held wig and beard

towards the window, and let the moonlight play over them. 'On with

them, quick! . . . And the boots.' Again he dived into the armoire,

and produced a pair of Bluchers, the long ankle leathers gummed over

with cotton-wool, to represent snow. 'It's lucky they reach a good

way up the leg, seeing the cloak is a trifle short for a man of your

inches.' He stepped back a pace and surveyed me as I fitted on the

beard.

'There are punishments and punishments,' said I. 'And I hope,

whatever your game may be, you will remember that there's punishment

in dressing up like a tom-fool.'

'Ah, but you'll catch the spirit of it!' he assured me: and then,

rubbing his hands, he appeared to muse for a moment. 'I ought,' said

he, with a glance towards the fireplace, 'I really ought to send

Father Christmas down by way of the chimney. The flue opens just

above here, and I believe it would accommodate you; but I am not very

sure if my housekeeper had it swept last spring. No,' he decided,

'the music has ceased, and we must lose no time. I will spare you

the chimney.'

He called to his rabbits, picked them up as they came hopping from

behind the curtains, popped them into his hat, shut it with a snap,

and lo! they had vanished.

'You'll excuse me,' I ventured, as he stepped to the door; 'but--but

the--the few articles here in the bag--'

'Oh, bring them along with you: bring them along by all means!

We may have a present or two to make, down below.'

From the head of the staircase we looked down into a hall gaily lit

with paper lanterns. Holly and ivy wreathed the broad balustrade,

and the old pictures around the walls. A bunch of mistletoe hung

from a great chandelier that sparkled with hundreds of glass prisms,

and under it a couple of footmen in gilt liveries and powder crossed

at that moment with trays of jellies and syllabubs.

They were well-trained footmen, too; for at sight of me descending

the stairs in my idiotic outfit they betrayed no surprise at all.

One of them set his tray down on a table, stepped neatly ahead as Mr

Felix reached the lowest stair, and opened a door for us on the

right. I found myself at a stand on the threshold, blinking at a

blaze of light, and staring up a perspective of waxed floor at a

miniature stage which filled the far end of the room. Light, as

every one knows, travels farther than sound: were it not so, I should

say that almost ahead of the blaze there broke on us a din of

voices--of happy children's voices. Certainly it stunned my ears

before I had time to blink.

The room was lined with children--scores of children: and some of

them were gathered in little groups, and some of them, panting and

laughing from their dance, had dropped into the chairs ranged along

the walls. But these were the minority. The most of the guests lay

in cots, or sat with crutches beside them, or with hands dropped in

their laps. These last were the blind ones. I do not set up to be a

lover of children: but the discovery that the most of these small

guests were crippled hit me with a kind of pitiful awe; and right on

top of it came a second and worse shock, to note how many of them

were blind.

To me these blind eyes were the only merciful ones, as Mr Felix

beckoned Father Christmas to follow him up to the stage between the

two lines of curious gazers. 'O--oh!' had been their first cry as

they caught sight of me in the doorway: and 'O--oh!' I heard them

murmuring, child after child, in long-drawn fugue, as we made our way

up the long length of the room that winked detection from every

candle, every reflector, every foot of its polished floor.

We gained the stage together by a short stairway draped with flags.

Mr Felix with a wave of his opera-hat, called on the orchestra to

strike up 'A Fine Old English Gentleman' (meaning me or, if you like

it, Father Christmas: and I leave you to picture the fool I looked).

Then, stepping to the footlights, he introduced me, explaining that

he had met me wandering upstairs, rifling his most secret drawers to

fill my bag with seasonable presents for them. Five or six times he

interrupted his patter to pluck a cracker or a bon-bon out of my

beard, and toss it down to his audience. The children gasped at

first, and stared at the magic spoil on the floor. By-and-by one

adventurous little girl crept forward, and picked up a cracker, and

her cry of delight as she discovered that it was real, gave the

signal for a general scramble. Mr Felix continued his patter without

seeming to heed it: but his hand went up faster and faster to my

beard and wig, and soon the crackers were falling in showers.

I saw children snatch them off the floor and carry them to their

blind brothers and sisters, pressing them between the wondering,

groping hands with assurance that they were real. . . . Mr Felix saw

it too, and his flow of words ceased with a gulp, as though a

flowing spring gurgled suddenly and withdrew itself underground.

'I am a sentimentalist,' he said to me quickly, in a pause which

nobody heeded; for by this time crackers were banging to right and

left, and the children shouting together. Their shouts rose to one

yell of laughter as, recovering himself, he dived at my neck, and

produced the two struggling rabbits. His opera-hat opened with a

snap, and in they went. A second later it shut flat again, and they

were gone, into thin air. He opened the hat with a puzzled frown,

plunged a hand, and dragged forth yard upon yard of ribbon--red,

green, white, blue, yellow ribbon, mixed up with packs of playing

cards that, with a turn of the hand he sent spinning into air, to

fall thick as leaves in Vallombrosa.

'Your turn!' he panted as, at the end of the ribbon he lugged out an

enormous cabbage, and trundled it down the room. Catching my bag

from me, he shook his cloak over it once, and returned it to my

hands, bulging, stuffed full to the brim with toys--dolls, tops,

whips, trumpets, boxes of animals, boxes of tin soldiers. . . .

'Father Christmas, now! Make way for Father Christmas!'

The infection took me, and stumbling down from the stage by the

stairway, I fell to distributing the largesse left and right.

The first bagful carried me less than a third of the way down the

room: for I gave with both hands, and, when a blind child fumbled

long with a toy, dropped it at his feet, and tried another, and yet

another till his smile suited me. The dropped toys lay where they

had fallen. The spirit of the game had made me reckless; and I

halted with a cold shiver as my fingers touched the gems at the

bottom of the bag, and, looking down the room, I was aware that my

store was exhausted, and as yet two-thirds of the children had

received no gift. I turned--all in a cold shiver--to retrace my

steps and pick up the toys at the blind children's feet, and as I did

so, felt myself a bungler past pardon. But in the act of turning, I

cast a look back at the stage: and there stood Mr Felix, nodding

approval and beckoning. So, as in a dream, I went back, 'Capital!'

was his only comment. Taking my bag, he passed his cloak over it

again, and again handed it to me, stuffed to the brim.

Thrice I returned to him; but the third refill was a scanty one,

since by this time there lacked but half a score of the taller

children to be satisfied. To these, too, I distributed their gifts,

and when every eager pair of hands had been laden, I wheeled about

for the next word of command.

But Mr Felix had skipped down from the stage, letting the curtain

fall behind him. He stood with his back to me, waving both arms to

the orchestra; and as the musicians plunged at the opening bars of

the Toy Symphony, the curtain rose, almost as soon as it had dropped;

and rose upon a scene representing a street with shops decked for

Christmas, and snow upon their eaves and window ledges.

Then, still to the strains of the Toy Symphony, a Harlequin ran in,

with a Columbine, whom he twisted upon his bent knee, and tossed

lightly through the upper window of a baker's shop, himself diving a

moment later, with a slap of his wand, through the flap of the

fishmonger's door, hard by. Next, as on a frozen slide, came the

Clown, with red-hot poker, the Pantaloon tripping over his stick, and

two Constables wreathed in strings of sausages. The Clown boxed the

Pantaloon's ears; the Pantaloon passed on the buffet to the

Constables, and all plunged together into the fishmonger's.

The Clown emerged running with a stolen plaice, passed it into the

hands of the Pantaloon, who followed, and was in turn pursued off the

scene by the Constables: but the fishmonger, issuing last in chase,

ran into the Clown, who caught up a barrel of red herrings and

bonneted him. The fishmonger extricated himself, and the two began

to pelt each other with herrings, while the children screamed with

laughter. . . .

It was a famous harlequinade; and, as usual, it concluded the

entertainment. For after a harlequinade, what can stand between a

child and happy dreams?--especially if he go to them with his arms

full of Christmas presents. Five minutes after the curtain had

fallen I found myself standing beside Mr Felix in the hall, while he

bade good-night to his guests. Carriages of his hiring had arrived

for them, and the coachmen apparently had received their orders.

A dozen well-trained nurses moved about the hall, and, having dressed

the little ones--who by this time were almost too drowsy with

pleasure to thank their entertainer--carried them out into the

portico, where the liveried footmen stood by the carriage doors.

Slam! went the doors, and one after another--with scarcely a word of

command-the carriages bowled off over the thick snow.

When the last guest had gone, Mr Felix turned to me.

'The play is over,' said he. 'When I am gone, it will be repeated

year after year at Christmas, at the Cripples' Hospital. My will

provides for that, and that will be my monument. But for a few years

to come I hope to hold the entertainment here, in my own house.

Come, you may take off your robe and wig and go in peace. I would

fain have a talk with you, but I am tired, as perhaps you may guess.

Go, then--and go in peace!'

Motioning the footman to fall back, he walked out with me and down

the steps of the portico; but halted on the lowest step by the edge

of the frozen snow, and with a wave of the hand dismissed me into the

night.

I had gained the end of the street and the bridge that there spans

the river before it occurred to me that I was carrying my bag, and--

with a shock--that my bag still held the stolen jewels.

By the second lamp on the bridge I halted, lifted the bag on to the

snow-covered parapet, thrust in a hand, and drew forth--a herring!

Herrings--red herrings--filled the bag to the brim. I dragged them

forth, and rained handful after handful overboard into the black

water. Still, below them, I had hopes to find the jewels. But the

jewels were gone. At least, I supposed that all were gone, when--

having jettisoned the last herring--I groped around the bottom of the

bag.

Something pricked my finger. I drew it out and held it under the

lamp-light. It was a small turquoise brooch, set around with

diamonds.

For at least two minutes I stared at it, there, under the lamp; had

slipped it half-way into my waistcoat pocket; but suddenly took a new

resolve, and walked back along the street to the house.

Mr Felix yet stood on the lower step of the portico. Above him,

still as a statue, a footman waited at the great house-door, until it

should please his master to re-enter.

'Excuse me, sir--' I began, and held up the brooch.

'I meant it for you,' said Mr Felix quietly, affably. 'I gave

precisely five pounds for it, at an auction, and I warn you that

it is worth just thrice that sum. Still, if you would prefer

ready-money, as in your circumstances I dare say you do,--he felt in

his breeches pocket--'here are the five sovereigns, and--once more--

go in peace.'

THE MAYOR'S DOVECOT: A CAUTIONARY TALE.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century there lived at Dolphin

House, Troy, a Mr Samuel Pinsent, ship-chandler, who by general

consent was the funniest fellow that ever took up his abode in the

town. He came originally from somewhere in the South Hams, but this

tells us nothing, for the folk of the South Hams are a decent, quiet

lot, and you might travel the district to-day from end to end without

coming across the like of Mr Pinsent.

He was, in fact, an original. He could do nothing like an ordinary

man, and he did everything jocosely, with a wink and a chuckle.

To watch him, you might suppose that business was a first-class

practical joke, and he invariably wound up a hard bargain by slapping

his victim on the back. Some called him Funny Pinsent, others The

Bester. Few liked him. Nevertheless he prospered, and in 1827 was

chosen mayor of the borough.

In person, Mr Pinsent was spare and diminutive, with a bald head, a

tuft of badger-gray hair over either ear, and a fresh-coloured,

clean-shaven face, extraordinarily wrinkled about the face and at the

corners of the eyes, which twinkled at you from under a pair of

restless stivvery eyebrows. You had only to look at them and note

the twitch of his lips to be warned of the man's facetiousness.

Mr Pinsent's office--for he had no shop-front, and indeed his

stock-in-trade was not of a quality to invite inspection--looked out

upon the Town Square; his back premises upon the harbour, across a

patch of garden, terminated by a low wall and a blue-painted

quay-door. I call it a garden because Mr Pinsent called it so; and,

to be sure, it boasted a stretch of turf, a couple of flower-beds, a

flagstaff, and a small lean-to greenhouse. But casks and coils of

manilla rope, blocks, pumps, and chain-cables, encroached upon the

amenities of the spot--its pebbled pathway, its parterres, its raised

platform overgrown with nasturtiums, where Mr Pinsent sat and smoked

of an evening and watched the shipping; the greenhouse stored sacks

of ship-bread as well as pot-plants; and Mrs Salt, his housekeeper

(he was unmarried), had attached a line to the flagstaff, and aired

the washing thereon.

But the pride of the garden was its dovecote, formed of a large

cider-barrel on a mast. The barrel was pierced with pigeon-holes,

and fitted with ledges on which the birds stood to preen themselves.

Mr Pinsent did not profess himself a fancier. His columbarium--a

mixed collection of fantails and rocketers--had come to him by a

side-wind of business, as offset against a bad debt; but it pleased

him to sit on his terrace and watch the pretty creatures as they

wheeled in flight over the harbour and among the masts of the

shipping. They cost him nothing to keep, for he had always plenty of

condemned pease on hand; and they multiplied in peace at the top of

their mast, which was too smooth for any cat to climb.

One summer's night, however, about midway in the term of his

mayoralty, Mr Pinsent was awakened from slumber by a strange sound of

fluttering. It came through the open window from the garden, and

almost as he sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes it warned him that

something serious was amiss with his dovecote. He flung off the

bed-clothes and made a leap for the window.

The night was warm and windless, with a waning moon in the east, and

as yet no tremble of the dawn below it. Around the foot of the

dovecote the turf lay in blackest shadow; but a moon-ray overtopping

the low ridge of Mr Garraway's back premises (Mr Pinsent's next-door

neighbour on the left), illuminated the eastern side of the barrel,

the projecting platform on which it rested, and a yard or more of the

mast, from its summit down--or, to be accurate, it shed a pale

radiance on a youthful figure, clinging there by its legs, and upon a

hand and arm reaching over the platform to rob the roost.

'You infernal young thief!' shouted Mr Pinsent.

As his voice broke upon the night across the silent garden, the hand

paused suddenly in the act of dragging forth a pigeon which it had

gripped by the neck. The bird, almost as suddenly set free, flapped

across the platform, found its wings and scuffled away in flight.

The thief--Mr Pinsent had been unable to detect his features-slid

down the mast into darkness, and the darkness, a moment later, became

populous with whispering voices and the sound of feet stealing away

towards the yet deeper shadow of Mr Garraway's wall.

'Who goes there?' challenged Mr Pinsent again. 'Villains! Robbers!

You just wait till I come down to you! I've a gun here, by George!

and if you don't stand still there and give me your names--'

But this was an empty threat. Mr Pinsent, though nothing of a

sportsman, did indeed possess a gun, deposited with him years ago as

security against a small loan. But it hung over the office

chimney-piece downstairs, and he could not have loaded it, even if

given the necessary powder and shot. Possibly the boys guessed this.

At any rate, they made no answer.

Possibly, too (for a white nightcap and nightshirt were discernible

in almost pitchy darkness), they saw him strut back from the window

to slip downstairs and surprise them. Mr Pinsent paused only to

insert his feet into a pair of loose slippers, and again, as he

unbolted the back door, to snatch a lantern off its hook. Yet by the

time he ran out upon the garden the depredators had made good their

escape.

He groped inside the lantern for the tinder-box, which lay within,

handy for emergencies; found it, and kneeling on the grass-plot

beside the mast, struck flint upon steel. As he blew upon the tinder

and the faint glow lit up his face and nightcap, a timorous

exclamation quavered down from one of the upper windows.

'Oh, sir! Wha--whatever is the matter?' It was the voice of Mrs

Salt, the housekeeper.

For a moment Mr Pinsent did not answer. In the act of thrusting the

brimstone match into the lantern his eye had fallen on a white object

lying on the turf and scarcely a yard away--a white fan-tail pigeon,

dead, with a twisted neck. He picked up the bird and stared around

angrily into the darkness.

'Robbery is the matter, ma'am,' he announced, speaking up to the

unseen figure in the window. 'Some young ruffians have been stealing

and killing my pigeons. I caught 'em in the act, and a serious

matter they'll find it.' Here Mr Pinsent raised his voice, in case

any of the criminals should be lurking within earshot. 'I doubt,

ma'am, a case like this will have to go to the assizes.'

'Hadn't you better put something on?' suggested another voice, not

Mrs Salt's, from somewhere on the left.

'Eh?' Mr Pinsent wheeled about and peered into the darkness.

'Is that you, Garraway?'

'It is,' answered Mr Garraway from his bedroom window over the wall.

'Been stealin' your pigeons, have they? Well, I'm sorry; and yet in

a way 'tis a relief to my mind. For, first along, seeing you, out

there, skipping round in your shirt with a lantern, I'd a fear you

had been taken funny in the night!'

'Bless the man!' said Mr Pinsent. 'Do you suppose I'd do this for a

joke?'

I don't know,' responded Mr Garraway, with guarded candour.

'I feared it. But, of course, if they've stolen your pigeons, 'tis

another matter. A very serious matter, as you say, and no doubt your

being mayor makes it all the worse.'

Now this attitude of Mr Garraway conveyed a hint of warning, had Mr

Pinsent been able to seize it. The inhabitants of Troy have, in

fact, a sense of humour, but it does not include facetiousness.

On the contrary, facetiousness affronts and pains them. They do not

understand it, and Mr Pinsent understood nothing else. Could he have

been told that for close upon twenty years he had been afflicting his

neighbours with the pleasantries he found so enjoyable, his answer

had undoubtedly been 'The bigger numskulls they!' But now his doom

was upon him.

He ate his breakfast that morning in silence. Mrs Salt, burning to

discuss the robbery, set down the dishes with a quite unnecessary

clatter, but in vain. He scarcely raised his head.

'Indeed, sir, and I've never known you so upset,' she broke out at

length, unable to contain herself longer. 'Which I've always said

that you was wonderful, the way you saw the bright side of everything

and could pass it off with a laugh.'

'Good Lord!' said Mr Pinsent testily. 'Did I ever call midnight

robbery a laughing matter?'

'No--o,' answered Mrs Salt, yet as one not altogether sure.

'And I dare say your bein' mayor makes you take a serious view.'

Breakfast over, the mayor took hat and walking-stick for his

customary morning stroll along the street to Butcher Trengrove's to

choose the joint for his dinner and pick up the town's earliest

gossip. It is Troy's briskest hour; when the dairy carts, rattling

homeward, meet the country folk from up-the-river who have just

landed at the quays and begun to sell from door to door their poultry

and fresh eggs, vegetables, fruit, and nosegays of garden flowers;

when the tradesmen, having taken down their shutters, stand in the

roadway, admire the effect of their shop-windows and admonish the

apprentices cleaning the panes; when the children loiter and play at

hop-scotch on their way to school, and the housewives, having packed

them off, find time for neighbourly clack over the scouring of

door-steps.

It might be the mayor's fancy and no more, but it certainly appeared

to him that the children smiled with a touch of mockery as they met

him and saluted. For aught he knew any one of these grinning imps--

confound 'em!--might be implicated in the plot. The townsmen gave

him 'good-morning' as usual, and yet not quite as usual. He felt

that news of the raid had won abroad; that, although shy of speaking,

they were studying his face for a sign. He kept it carefully

cheerful; but came near to losing his temper when he reached

Trengrove's shop to find Mr Garraway already there and in earnest

conversation with the butcher.

'Ah! good-mornin' again! I was just talkin' about you and your

pigeons,' said Mr Garraway, frankly.

'Good-morning, y'r Worship,' echoed Butcher Trengrove. 'And what can

I do for y'r Worship this fine morning? I was just allowin' to Mr

Garraway here that, seein' the young dare-devils had left you a bird

with their compliments, maybe you'd fancy a nice cut of rumpsteak to

fill out a pie.'

'This isn't exactly a laughing matter, Mr Trengrove.'

'No, no, to be sure!' Butcher Trengrove composed his broad smile

apologetically. But, after a moment, observing Mr Pinsent's face and

that (at what cost he guessed not) it kept its humorous twist, he let

his features relax. 'I was allowin' though, that if any man could

get even with a bit of fun, it would be y'r Worship.'

'Oh, never fear but I'll get even with 'em,' promised his Worship,

affecting an easiness he did not feel.

'Monstrous, though! monstrous!' pursued the butcher. 'The boys of

this town be gettin' past all control. Proper young limbs, I call

some of 'em.'

'And there's the fellow that's to blame,' put in Mr Garraway, with a

nod at a little man hurrying past the shop, on the opposite pavement.

This was Mr Lupus, the schoolmaster, on his way to open school.

'Hi! Mr Lupus!'

Mr Lupus gave a start, came to a halt, and turned on the shop door a

pair of mildly curious eyes guarded by moon-shaped spectacles.

Mr Lupus lived with an elderly sister who kept a bakehouse beside the

Ferry Landing, and there in extra-scholastic hours he earned a little

money by writing letters for seamen. His love-letters had quite a

reputation, and he penned them in a beautiful hand, with flourishes

around the capital letters; but in Troy he passed for a person of

small account.

'I--I beg your pardon, gentlemen! Were you calling to me?' stammered

Mr Lupus.

'Good-morning, Lupus!' The mayor nodded to him. 'We were just

saying that you bring up the boys of this town shamefully. Yes, sir,

shamefully.'

'No, indeed, your Worship,' protested Mr Lupus, looking up with a

timid smile, as he drew off his spectacles and polished them.

'Your Worship is pleasant with me. I do assure you, gentlemen, that

my boys are very good boys, and give me scarcely any trouble.'

'That's because you sit at school in your daydreams, and don't take

note of the mischief that goes on around you. A set of anointed

young scoundrels, Mr Lupus!'

'You don't mean it, sir. Oh, to be sure you don't mean it! Your

Worship's funny way of putting things is well known, if I may say so.

But they are good boys, on the whole, very good boys; and you should

see the regularity with which they attend. I sometimes wish--meaning

no offence--that you gentlemen of position in the town would drop in

upon us a little oftener. It would give you a better idea of us,

indeed it would. For my boys are very good boys, and for regularity

of attendance we will challenge any school in Cornwall, sir, if you

will forgive my boasting.'

Now this suggestion of Mr Lupus, though delicately put, and in a

nervous flutter, ought by rights to have hit the mayor and Mr

Garraway hard; the pair of them being trustees of the charity under

which the Free Grammar School was administered. But in those days

few public men gave a thought to education, and Mr Lupus taught

school, year in and year out, obedient to his own conscience, his own

enthusiasms; unencouraged by visitation or word of advice from his

governors.

The mayor, to be sure, flushed red for a moment; but Mr Garraway's

withers were unwrung.

'That don't excuse their committing burglary and stealing his

Worship's pigeons,' said he. Briefly he told what had happened.

Mr Lupus adjusted and readjusted his spectacles, still in a nervous

flurry.

'You surprise me, gentlemen. It is unlike my boys--unlike all that I

have ever believed of them. You will excuse me, but if this be true,

I shall take it much to heart. So regular in attendance, and--

stealing pigeons, you say? Oh, be sure, sirs, I will give them a

talking-to--a severe talking-to--this very morning.'

The little schoolmaster went his way down the street in a flutter.

Mr Pinsent stared after him abstractedly.

'That man,' said he, after a long pause, 'ought to employ some one to

use his cane for him.'

With this, for no apparent reason, his eye brightened suddenly.

But the source of his inspiration he kept to himself. His manner was

jocular as ever as he ordered his steak.

On his way home he knocked at the door of the town sergeant, Thomas

Trebilcock, a septuagenarian, more commonly known as Pretty Tommy.

The town sergeant was out in the country, picking mushrooms; but his

youngest granddaughter, who opened the door, promised to send him

along to the mayor's office as soon as ever he returned.

At ten o'clock, or a little later, Pretty Tommy presented himself,

and found Mr Pinsent at his desk engaged in complacent study of a

sheet of manuscript, to which he had just attached his signature.

'I think this will do,' said Mr Pinsent, with a twinkle, and he

recited the composition aloud.

Pretty Tommy, having adjusted his horn spectacles, took the paper and

read it through laboriously.

'You want me to cry it through the town?'

'Certainly. You can fetch your bell, and go along with it at once.'

'Your Worship knows best, o' course.' Pretty Tommy appeared to

hesitate.

'Why, what's wrong with it?'

'Nothin',' said Tommy, after a slow pause and another perusal, 'only

'tis unusual--unusual, and funny at the same time; an' that's always

a risk.' He paused again for a moment, and his face brightened.

'But there!' he said, ''tis a risk you're accustomed to by this

time.'

Half an hour later the sound of the town sergeant's bell at the end

of the street called tradesmen from their benches and housewives from

their kitchens to hear the following proclamation, to which Tommy had

done honour by donning his official robe (of blue, gold-laced) with a

scarlet pelisse and a cocked hat. A majestic figure he made, too,

standing in the middle of the roadway with spectacles on nose, and

the great handbell tucked under his arm--

'O YES! O YES! O YES!

'Take you all notice: that whereas some evil-disposed boys did

last night break into the premises of Samuel Pinsent,

Worshipful Mayor of this Borough, and did rob His Worship of

several valuable pigeons; His Worship hereby offers a reward of

Five Shillings to the parent or parents of any such boy as will

hand him over, that the Mayor may have ten minutes with him in

private. Amen.

'GOD SAVE THE KING!'

Mr Pinsent, seated in his office, heard the bell sounding far up the

street, and chuckled to himself. He chuckled again, peering through

his wire blinds, when Pretty Tommy emerged upon the square outside

and took his stand in the middle of it to read the proclamation.

It collected no crowd, but it drew many faces to the windows and

doorways, and Mr Pinsent observed that one and all broke into grins

as they took the humour of his offer.

He rubbed his hands together. He had been angry to begin with; yes--

he would confess it--very angry. But he had overcome it and risen to

his reputation. The town had been mistaken in thinking it could put

fun on him. It was tit-for-tat again, and the laugh still with

Samuel Pinsent.

He ate his dinner that day in high good humour, drank a couple of

glasses of port, and retired (as his custom was on warm afternoons)

to his back-parlour, for an hour's siesta. Through the open window

he heard the residue of his pigeons murmuring in their cotes, and the

sound wooed him to slumber. So for half an hour he slept, with an

easy conscience, a sound digestion, and a yellow bandanna

handkerchief over his head to protect him from the flies. A tapping

at the door awakened him.

'There's a woman here--Long Halloran's wife, of Back Street--wishes

to see you, sir,' announced the voice of Mrs Salt.

'Woman!' said the mayor testily. 'Haven't you learned by this time

that I'm not to be disturbed after dinner?'

'She said her business was important, sir. It's--it's about the

pigeons,' explained Mrs Salt.

And before he could protest again, Mrs Halloran had thrust her way

into the room and stood curtseying, with tears of recent weeping upon

her homely and extremely dirty face. Behind her shuffled a lanky,

sheepish-eyed boy, and took up his stand at her shoulder with a look

half-sullen, half-defiant.

'It's about my Mike, sir,' began Mrs Halloran, in a lachrymose voice,

and paused to dab her eyes with a corner of her apron. 'Which I'm

sure, sir, we ought to be very grateful to you for all your kindness

and the trouble you're takin', and so says the boy's father.

For he's growin' up more of a handful every day, and how to manage

him passes our wits.'

'Are you telling me, Mrs Halloran, that this boy of yours is the

thief who stole my pigeons?'

Mr Pinsent, looking at the boy with a magisterial frown, began to

wish he had not been quite so hasty in sending round the town

sergeant.

'You did, didn't you, Mike?' appealed Mrs Halloran. And Mike,

looking straight before him, grunted something which might pass for

an admission. 'You must try to overlook the boy's manner, sir.

He's case-hardened, I fear, and it goes sore to a mother's heart that

ever I should rear up a child to be a thief. But as Halloran said to

me, "Take the young limb to his Worship," Halloran says, "and maybe a

trifle of correction by a gentleman in his Worship's position will

have some effect," he says. But I hope, sir, you won't visit all the

punishment on Mike, for he didn't do it alone; and though I'm not

sayin' he don't deserve all he gets, 'tisn't fair to make him the

only scapegoat--now is it, sir?'

'My good woman, I--I have no such intention,' stammered the mayor,

glancing at the lad again, and liking his appearance worse than ever.

'I thank your Worship.' Mrs Halloran dropped a quick curtsey.

'And so I made free to tell Halloran, who was in doubt of it.

"Mr Pinsent," I said, "is a just-minded man, an' you may be sure," I

said, "he'll mete out the same to all, last as well as first."'

'Yes, yes!' The mayor took her up impatiently and paused for a

moment, still eyeing the boy. 'Er--by the way, what age is your

son?'

'Rising fifteen, sir; christened fifteen years ago last St Michael's

Day, which is the twenty-ninth of September, though little good it

done him. He takes after his father, sir. All the Hallorans shoot

up tall, like runner beans; and thick in the bone. Or so his father

says. For my part, I've never been to Ireland; but by the looks of

en you'd say not a day less than seventeen. It seems like

blood-money, my takin' five shillin' and handin' the child over--at

his tender age--and me his own mother that nursed en!'

Here Mrs Halloran, whose emotions had been mastering her for some

moments, broke down in a violent fit of sobbing; and this so affected

her offspring that he emitted a noise like the hoot of a dog.

As he started it without warning, so abruptly he ended it, and looked

around with an impassive face.

It was uncanny. It shook the mayor's nerve. 'My dear Mrs Halloran,

if you will let me have a word or two with your son--'

'Oh, I know!' she wailed. 'That's how you put it. But you give me

over the money, sir, and let me go quick, before I weaken on it.

You never had a child of your own, Mr Pinsent--and more's the pity

for the child--but with one of your own you'd know what it feels

like!'

Mr Pinsent felt in his trouser-pocket, drew forth two half-crowns,

and pressed them into Mrs Halloran's dirty palm. With a sob and a

blessing she escaped. He heard her run sobbing down the passage to

the front door. Then he turned upon Mike.

The boy had sidled round with his back against the wall, and stood

there with his left elbow up and his fists half clenched. For the

space of half a minute the mayor eyed him, and he eyed the mayor.

'Sit down, Mike,' said the mayor gently.

'Goo! What d'ye take me for?' said Mike, lifting his hands a little.

'Sit down, I tell you.'

'Huh--yes, an' let you cop me over the head? You just try it--that's

all; you just come an' try it?'

'I--er--have no intention of trying it,' said Mr Pinsent.

'It certainly would not become me to administer--to inflict--corporal

punishment on a youth of your--er--inches. What grieves me--what

pains me more than I can say, is to find a boy of your--er-size

and er--development--by which I mean mental development, sense of

responsibility--er--mixed up in this disgraceful affair.

I had supposed it to be a prank, merely--a piece of childish

mischief--and that the perpetrators were quite small boys.'

(Here--not a doubt of it--Mr Pinsent was telling the truth.)

'Why,' he went on, with the air of one making a pleasant little

discovery, 'I shouldn't be surprised to find you almost as tall as

myself! Yes. I declare I believe you are quite as tall! No'-he

put up a hand as Mike, apparently suspecting a ruse, backed in a

posture of defence--'we will not take our measures to-day. I have

something more serious to think about. For you will have noticed

that while I suspected this robbery to be the work of small

thoughtless boys, I treated it lightly; but now that I find a great

strapping fellow like you mixed up in the affair, it becomes my

business to talk to you very seriously indeed.'

And he did. He sat down facing Mike Halloran across the table, and

read him a lecture that should have made any boy of Mike's size

thoroughly ashamed of himself; and might have gone on admonishing for

an hour had not Mrs Salt knocked again at the door.

'If you please,' announced Mrs Salt, 'here's the Widow Barnicutt from

the Quay to see you, along with her red-headed 'Dolphus.'

'Which,' said the Widow Barnicutt, panting in at her heels and

bobbing a curtsey, 'it's sorry I am to be disturbin' your Worship,

and I wouldn't do it if his poor father was alive and could give 'em

the strap for his good. But the child bein' that out of hand that

all my threats do seem but to harden him, and five shillin' a week's

wage to an unprovided woman; and I hope your Worship will excuse the

noise I make with my breathin', which is the assma, and brought on by

fightin' my way through the other women.'

Mr Pinsent gasped, and put up a hand to his brow.

'The other women?' he echoed. 'What other women?'

'The passage is full of 'em,' said Mrs Salt, much as though she were

reporting that the house was on fire.

'Ay,' said the widow, 'but my 'Dolphus is the guilty one--I got his

word for it.'

'There's Maria Bunny,' persisted Mrs Salt, beginning to tick off the

list on her fingers, 'Maria Bunny with her Wesley John, and Mary

Polly Polwarne with her Nine Days' Wonder, and Amelia Trownce with

the twins, and Deb Hicks with the child she christened Nonesuch,

thinkin' 'twas out of the Bible; and William Spargo's second wife

Maria with her step-child, and Catherine Nance with her splay-footed

boy that I can never remember the name of--'

'Oh! send 'em away!' bawled Mr Pinsent. 'Send 'em away before their

husbands come home from work and raise a riot!' Then he recollected

himself. 'No, fetch 'em all in here, from the street,' said he,

dropping into a chair and taking his head in both hands. 'Fetch 'em

all in, and let me deal with 'em!'

The town, when it laughed over the story next day, found the cream of

the joke in this--Bester Pinsent, in promising Mrs Halloran that her

boy should but share punishment with the rest, had forgotten in his

agitation of mind to stipulate that the reward should also be

divided. As it was, he had paid her the full five shillings, and the

rest of the women (there were twenty-four) would be content with

nothing less.

But it was really little Mr Lupus, the schoolmaster, that--all

unconsciously--had the last word. Trotting past Butcher Trengrove's

shop next morning, on his way to open school, Mr Lupus caught sight

of his Worship standing within the doorway, halted, and came across

the street with a nervous flush on his face.

'Mr Mayor, sir, if I may have a word with you? Begging your pardon,

sir, but it lies on my conscience--all night, sir, it has been

troubling me--that I boasted to you yesterday of my boys' good

attendance. Indeed, sir, it has been good in the past. But yesterday

afternoon! Oh, sir, I fear that you were right, after all, and

something serious is amiss with the boys of this town!'

I regret that I cannot report here the precise words of Mr Pinsent's

reply.

NEWS FROM TROY!

Troy--not for the first time in its history--is consumed with

laughter; laughter which I deprecate, while setting down as an

impartial chronicler the occasion and the cause of it.

You must know that our venerable and excellent squire, Sir Felix

Felix-Williams, has for some years felt our little town getting, as

he puts it, 'beyond him.' He remembers, in his father's time, the

grass growing in our streets. The few vessels that then visited the

port brought American timber-props for the mines out of which the

Felix-Williams estate drew its royalties, and shipped in exchange

small cargoes of emigrants whom, for one reason or another, that

estate was unable to support. It was a simple system, and Sir Felix

has often in talk with me lamented its gradual strangulation, in his

time, by the complexities of modern commerce.--You should hear, by

the way, Sir Felix pronounce that favourite phrase of his 'in my

time'; he does it with a dignified humility, as who should say,

'Observe, I am of the past indeed, but I have lent my name to an

epoch.'

As a fact the access of a railway to our little port, the building of

jetties for the china-clay trade, the development of our harbour

which now receives over 300,000 tons of shipping annually--all these

have, in ways direct and indirect, more than doubled the old

gentleman's income. But to do him justice, he regards this scarcely

at all. He sets it down--and rightly--to what he has taken to call

on public occasions 'the expansion of our Imperial Greatness'; but in

his heart of hearts he regrets his loosening hold on a population

that was used to sit under his fig-tree and drink of his cistern.

With their growth the working classes have come to prefer self-help

to his honest regulation of their weal. There has been no quarrel:

we all love Sir Felix and respect him, though now and then we laugh

at him a good deal.

There has been no quarrel, I repeat. But insensibly we have lost the

first place in his affections, which of late years have concentrated

themselves more and more upon the small village of Kirris-vean,

around a corner of the coast. By its mere beauty, indeed, any one

might be excused for falling in love with Kirris-vean. It lies,

almost within the actual shadow of Sir Felix's great house, at the

foot of a steep wooded coombe, and fronts with diminutive beach and

pier the blue waters of our neighbouring bay. The cottages are

whitewashed and garlanded with jasmine, solanum, the monthly rose.

Fuchsias bloom in their front gardens; cabbages and runner beans

climb the hillside in orderly rows at their backs. The women curtsey

to a stranger; the men touch their hats; and the inhabitants are

mostly advanced in years, for the young men and maidens leave the

village to go into 'good service' with testimonials Sir Felix takes a

delight to grant, because he has seen that they are well earned.

If you were to stand at the cross-roads in the middle of Eaton Square

and say 'Kirris-vean!' in a loud voice, it is odds (though I will not

promise) that a score of faces would arise from underground and gaze

out wistfully through area-railings. For no one born in Kirris-vean

can ever forget it. But Kirris-vean itself is inhabited by

grandparents and grandchildren (these last are known in Eaton Square

as 'Encumbrances'). It has a lifeboat in which Sir Felix takes a

peculiar pride (but you must not launch it unless in fine weather, or

the crew will fall out). It has also a model public-house, The Three

Wheatsheaves, so named from the Felix-Williams' coat of arms.

The people of Troy believe--or at any rate assert--that every one in

Kirris-vean is born with a complete suit of gilt buttons bearing that

device.

Few dissipations ripple the gentle flow--which it were more

descriptive perhaps to call stagnation--of life in that model

village. From week-end to week-end scarcely a boat puts forth from

the shelter of its weed-coated pier; for though Kirris-vean wears the

aspect of a place of fishery, it is in fact nothing of the kind.

Its inhabitants--blue-jerseyed males and sun-bonneted females--sit

comfortably on their pensions and tempt no perils of the deep.

Why should they risk shortening such lives as theirs? A few

crab-pots--'accessories,' as a painter would say--rest on the beach

above high-water mark, the summer through; a few tanned nets hang,

and have hung for years, a-drying against the wall of the

school-house. But the prevalent odour is of honeysuckle. The aged

coxswain of the lifeboat reported to me last year that an American

visitor had asked him how, dwelling remote from the railway, the

population dealt with its fish. 'My dear man,' said I, 'you should

have told him that you get it by Parcels' Post from Billingsgate.'

I never know--never, in this life shall I discover--how rumour

operates in Troy, how it arrives or is spread. Early in August a

rumour, incredible on the face of it, reached me that Kirris-vean

intended a Regatta! . . . For a week I disbelieved it; for almost

another week I forgot it; and then lo! Sir Felix himself called on me

and confirmed it.

A trio of young footmen (it appeared) had arrived in Kirris-vean to

spend a holiday on board-wages--their several employers having gone

northward for the grouse, to incommodious shooting-boxes where a few

servants sufficed. Finding themselves at a loose end (to use their

own phrase for it) these three young men had hit on the wild--the

happy--the almost delirious idea of a Regatta; and taking their

courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to

entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most

amiable mood, and within an hour--the old gentleman is discursive--he

had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the

gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have

originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from

London; yet a whisper of it had reached me on the 2nd or 3rd.

I repeat that I shall never understand the operation of rumour in

Troy.

Sir Felix, having somewhat rashly given his consent, in a cooler hour

began to foresee difficulties, and drove into Troy to impart them to

me. I know not why, on occasions of doubt and embarrassment such as

this, he ever throws himself (so to speak) on my bosom; but so it is.

The Regatta, he explained, ought to take place in August, and we were

already arrived at the middle of the month, Tuesday the 24th had been

suggested--a very convenient date for him: it was, as I might

remember, the day before Petty Sessions, immediately after which he

had as good as promised to visit his second son in Devonshire and

attend the christening of an infant grandchild. But would ten days

allow us time to organise the 'events,' hire a band, issue the

necessary posters, etc.?

I assured him that, hard as it might drive us, the thing could be

done. 'I shall feel vastly more confident,' he was good enough to

say, 'if you will consent to join our Committee.' And I accepted, on

the prospect of seeing some fun. But ah! could I have foreseen

_what_ fun!

'You relieve my mind, indeed. . . . And--er--perhaps you might also

help us by officiating as starter and--er--judge, or timekeeper?'

'Willingly,' said I; 'in any capacity the Committee may wish.'

'They will be more inclined to trust the decisions of one who--er--

does not live among them.'

'Is that so?' said I. 'In Kirris-vean, one would have thought--but,

after all, I shall have to forgo whatever public confidence depends

on the competitors being unacquainted with me, since two-thirds of

them will come to you from Troy.'

'You are sure?'

'Quite. Has it not struck you, Sir Felix, that Kirris-vean--ideal

spot for a regatta--has in itself neither the boats nor the men for

one?'

'We might fill up with a launch of the lifeboat,' he hazarded.

'If one could only be certain of the weather.'

'And a public tea, and a procession of the school children.'

'Admirable,' I agreed. 'Never fear, we will make up a programme.'

'Oh, and--er--by the way, Bates of the Wheatsheaf came to me this

morning for an Occasional Licence. He proposes to erect a booth in

his back garden. You see no objection?'

'None at all.'

'A most trustworthy man. . . . He could not apply, you see, at our

last Petty Sessions because he did not then know that a regatta was

contemplated; and the 25th will, of course, be too late. But the

licence can be granted under these circumstances by any two

magistrates sitting together; and I would suggest that you and I--'

'Certainly,' said I, and accompanied Sir Felix to the small room that

serves Troy for an occasional courthouse, where we solemnly granted

Bates his licence.

There is a something about Sir Felix that tempts to garrulity, and I

could fill pages here with an account of our preparations for the

Regatta; the daily visits he paid me--always in a fuss, and five

times out of six over some trivial difficulty that had assailed him

in the still watches of the night; the protracted meetings of

Committee in the upper chamber of the lifeboat-house at Kirris-vean.

But these meetings, and the suggestions Sir Felix made, and the votes

we took upon them, are they not recorded in the minute-book of the

First and Last Kirris-vean Regatta? Yes, thus I have to write it,

and with sorrow: there will never be another Regatta in that Arcadian

village.

Sir Felix, good man, started with a fixed idea that a regatta

differed from a Primrose Fete, if at all, then only in being

non-political. He could not get it out of his head that public

speeches were of the essence of the festivity; and when, with all the

tact at my command, I insisted on aquatics, he countered me by

proposing to invite down a lecturer from the Navy League! As he put

it in the heat of argument, 'Weren't eight _Dreadnoughts_ aquatic

enough for anybody?' But in the voting the three young footmen

supported me nobly. _They_ wanted fireworks, and were not wasting

any money on lecturers: also there was a feeling in Kirris-vean that,

while a regatta could scarcely be held without boat-racing, the

prizes should be just sufficient to attract competitors and yet on a

scale provoking no one to grumble at the amount of subscribed money

lost to the village. A free public tea was suggested. I resisted

this largesse; and we compromised on 'No Charge for Bona-fide

Schoolchildren'--whatever that might mean--and 'Fourpence a head for

Adults.'

The weather prospects, as the moment drew near, filled us with

anxious forebodings, for the anti-cyclonic spell showed signs of

breaking, and the Sunday and Monday wore lowering faces. But Tuesday

dawned brilliantly; and when after a hasty breakfast I walked over to

Kirris-vean, I found Sir Felix waiting for me at the top of the hill

in his open landau, with a smile on his face, a rose in his

button-hole, and a white waistcoat that put all misgivings to shame.

'A perfect day!' he called out with a wave of the hand.

'A foxy one,' I suggested, and pointed out that the wind sat in a

doubtful quarter, that it was backing against the sun, that it was

light and might at any time die away and cheat us of our sailing

matches.

'Always the boats with you!' he rallied me; 'my dear sir, it is going

to be perfect. As the song says, "We've got the ships, we've got the

men, and we've got the money too." An entire success, you may take

my word for it!'

We descended the hill to find the village gay with bunting, the

competing boats lying ready off the pier, a sizeable crowd already

gathered, and the Committee awaiting us at the beach-head. Each

committee-man wore a favour of blue-and-white ribbon, and upon our

arrival every hat flew off to Sir Felix, while the band played

'See the Conquering Hero Comes!'

It was, not to put too fine a point on the description, an atrocious

band. It had come from afar, from one of the inland china-clay

villages, and in hiring it the Committee had been constant to its

principle that no more money than was necessary should be allowed to

go out of Kirris-vean. Report--malicious, I feel sure--reached me

later, that, at the first note of it, an aloe in Sir Felix's gardens,

a mile away--a plant noted for blossoming once only in a hundred

years-burst into profuse and instantaneous bloom. Sir Felix himself,

who abounded all day in happy turns of speech, said the best thing of

this band. He said it was _sui generis_.

He was magnificent throughout. I am not going to describe the

Regatta, for sterner events hurry my pen forward. So let me only say

that the weather completely justified his cheery optimism; that the

breeze, though slight, held throughout the sailing events, and then

dropped, leaving the bay glassy as a lake for the rowers; that sports

ashore--three-legged races, egg-and-spoon races, sack races, races

for young men, races for old women, donkey races, a tug-of-war, a

greasy pole, a miller-and-sweep combat--filled the afternoon until

tea-time; that at tea the tables groaned with piles of saffron cake

and cream 'splitters'; and that when the company had, in Homeric

phrase--the only fit one for such a tea--put aside from them the

desire of meat and drink, Sir Felix stood up and made a speech.

'It was an admirable speech too. It began with 'My dear friends,'

and the exordium struck at once that paternal note which makes him,

with all his foibles, so lovable. 'They' must excuse him if he now

took his departure; for he had arrived at an age to feel the length

of a long day--even of a happy summer's day such as this had been.

To be innocently happy--that had used to be the boast of England, of

"Merry England "; and he had ever prized happy living faces in

Kirris-vean above the ancestral portraits--not all happy, if one

might judge from their expressions--hanging on his walls at home.'

(Prolonged applause greeted this; and deservedly, for he spoke no

more than he meant.) He became reminiscential, and singling out a

school-child here and there, discoursed of their grandparents, even

of their great-grandparents; recalled himself to pay a series of

graceful tributes to all who had contributed to make the day a

success; and wound up by regretting that he could not stay for the

fireworks.

Dear honest Sir Felix! I can see him now, bareheaded, his white

hairs lightly fluttered by the evening breeze that fluttered also the

flags above Mr Bates's booth immediately in his rear; the sunset

light on his broad immaculate waistcoat; the long tea-tables, with

their rows of faces all turned deferentially towards him; the shadows

slanting from the trees; the still expanse of the bay, and far across

the bay a bank of clouds softly, imperceptibly marshalling.

We cheered him to the echo, of course. At his invitation I walked

some way up the hill with him, to meet his carriage. He halted three

or four times in the road, still talking of the day's success.

He was even somewhat tremulous at parting.

'I shall see you to-morrow, at Tregantick?'--Tregantick is the centre

of the eight parishes included in our Petty Sessional Division, and

the seat of such justice as I and seven others help Sir Felix to

administer.

'Oh, assuredly,' said I.

I watched his carriage as it rounded the bend of the road, and so

faced about to return to the village. But I took second thought at

sight of the clouds massing across the bay and coming up--as it

seemed to me against the wind. They spelt thunder. In spite of my

early forebodings I had brought no mackintosh; my duties as a

Committee-man were over: and I have reached an age when fireworks

give me no more pleasure than I can cheerfully forgo or take for

granted. I had, having coming thus far on my homeward way, already

more than half a mind to pursue it, when the band started to render

the 'Merry Duchess' waltz, with reed instruments a semitone below the

brass. This decided me, and I reached my door as the first raindrops

fell.

When I awoke next morning it was still raining, and raining hard.

The thunderstorm had passed; but a westerly wind, following hard on

it, had collected much water from the Atlantic, and the heavens were

thick as a blanket. A tramp in the rain, however, seldom comes amiss

to me, and I trudged the three miles to the court-house in very

cheerful mood, now smoking, now pocketing my pipe to inhale those

first delicious scents of autumn, stored up by summer for a long day

of downpour.

Our Court meets at 11.15, and I timed myself (so well I know the road

in all weathers) to reach the magistrates' door on the stroke of the

quarter. Now Sir Felix, as Chairman, makes a point of arriving ten

or fifteen minutes ahead of time, for a preliminary chat with the

Clerk over the charge-sheet and any small details of business.

I was astonished, therefore, when, turning at the sound of wheels, I

beheld Sir Felix's carriage and pair descending the street behind me.

'Truly the Regatta must have unsettled his habits,' I murmured; and

then, catching the eye of one of the pair of constables posted at the

door, I gazed again and stood, as some of my fellow-novelists say,

'transfixed.' For the driver on the box was neither Sir Felix's

coachman, nor his second coachman, nor yet again one of his

stablemen; but a gardener, and a tenth-down under-gardener at that;

in fact, you could scarcely call him even an under-gardener, though

he did odd jobs about the gardens. To be short, it was Tommy Collins

a hydrocephalous youth generally supposed to be half-baked, or, as we

put it in Cornwall, 'not exactly'; and on his immense head, crowning

a livery suit which patently did not belong to him, Tommy Collins

wore a dilapidated billycock hat.

As the carriage drew up I noted with a lesser shock that the harness

was wrongly crossed: and with that, as one constable stepped forward

to open the carriage door, I saw the other wink and make a sign to

Tommy, who--quick-witted for once--snatched off his billycock and

held it low against his thigh on the off-side, pretending to shake

off the rain, but in reality using this device to conceal the horrid

thing. At the same time the other constable, receiving an umbrella

which Sir Felix thrust forth, opened it with remarkable dexterity,

and held it low over my friend's venerable head, thus screening from

sight the disreputable figure on the box. As a piece of smuggling it

was extremely neat; but as I turned to follow I heard Tommy Collins

ask, and almost with a groan,--

'Wot's the use?'

Four of our fellow-magistrates were already gathered in the little

room at the rear of the court-house: of whom the first to greet our

Chairman was Lord Rattley. Lord Rattley, a peer with very little

money and a somewhat indecorous past, rarely honours the Tregantick

bench by attending sessions; but for once he was here, and at once

started to banter Sir Felix on his unpunctuality.

'Very sorry, gentlemen; very sorry--most inexplicable,' stuttered Sir

Felix, who suffers from a slight impediment of the speech when

hurried. 'Servants at home seemed--conspired--detain me. Jukes'--

Jukes is Sir Felix's butler, an aged retainer of the best pattern--

'Jukes would have it, weather too inclement. Poof! I am not too

old, I hope, to stand a few drops of rain. Next he brings word that

Adamson'--Adamson is (or was) Sir Felix's trusted coachman--

'is indisposed and unable to drive me. "Then I'll have Walters,"

said I, losing my temper, "or I'll drive myself." Jukes must be

failing: and so must Walters be, for that matter. We might have

arrived ten minutes ago, but he drove execrably.'

'Reminds me--' began Lord Rattley, when Sir Felix--who is ever

nervous of that nobleman's reminiscences, and had by this time

divested himself of his Inverness cape, turned to the Clerk and

demanded news of a lad discharged at the last Sessions on his own and

parents' recognisances, to be given another chance under the eye of

our new Probation Officer.

'--Of a coachman I once had called Oke--William Oke,' continued Lord

Rattley imperturably. 'Drunken little sot he was, but understood

horses. One night I had out the brougham and drove into Bodmin to

mess with the Militia. The old Royal Cornwall Rangers messed at the

hotel in those days, in the long room they used for Assemblies.

About eleven o'clock I sent for my carriage, and along it came in due

course. Well, I dare say at that hour I wasn't myself in a condition

to be critical of Oke's--'

Sir Felix pulled out his watch, and asked me what I made the time.

'Off we drove,' pursued Lord Rattley, ignoring this hint, 'and I must

have dropped asleep at once. When I awoke the blessed vehicle had

come to a standstill. I called to Oke--no answer: so by-and-by I

opened the carriage door and stepped out. The horses had slewed

themselves in towards the hedge and were cropping peaceably: but no

Oke was on the box and still no Oke answered from anywhere when I

shouted. He had, as a fact, tumbled clean off the box half a mile

astern, and was lying at that moment in the middle of the road.

At that hour I had no mind to look for him, so I collected the reins

somehow, climbed up in front, and drove myself home. I had a butler

then by the name of Ibbetson--a most respectable man, with the face

of a Bible Christian minister; and, thought I, on my way up the

drive, "I'll give Ibbetson a small scare." So coming to the porch,

when Ibbetson heard the wheels and cast the door open, I kept my seat

like a rock. Pretty well pitch dark it was where I sat behind the

lamps. Ibbetson comes down the steps, opens the carriage door and

stands aside. After a moment he begins to breathe hard, pops his

head into the brougham, then his arm, feels about a bit, and comes

forward for a lamp. "My God, Bill!" says Ibbetson, looking up at me

in the dark. "What have you done with th' ould devil?"'

'I really think,' suggested Sir Felix hurriedly, 'we ought not to

keep the Court waiting.'

So in we filed, and the Court rose respectfully to its feet and stood

while we took our seats. The Superintendent of Police--an officer

new to our Division--gazed at me with a perfectly stolid face across

the baize-covered table. Yet somehow it struck me that the

atmosphere in Court was not, as usual, merely stuffy, but electrical;

that the faces of our old and tried constabulary twitched with some

suppressed excitement; and that the Clerk was fidgeting with an

attack of nerves.

'Certain supplementary cases, your Worship,' said he, taking a small

sheaf of papers from the hands of his underling, 'too late to be

included on the charge-sheet issued.'

'Eh?--Oh, certainly--certainly!' Sir Felix drew his spectacle case

from his waistcoat pocket and laid it on the table; took the paper

handed to him, and slipped it methodically beneath the sheet of

agenda; resumed the business of extracting his spectacles, adjusted

them, and gravely opened business.

He had it all to himself. For me, as I, too, received the paper of

supplementary cases, my first thought was of simple astonishment at

the length of the list. Then my gaze stiffened upon certain names,

and by degrees as I recognised them, my whole body grew rigid in my

chair. Samuel Sleeman--this was the Superintendent's name--appellant

against Isaac Adamson, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Duncan

McPhae, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Henry James Walters,

drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Selina Mary Wilkins, drunk on

licensed premises; Ditto against Mary Curtis, drunk on licensed

premises; Ditto against Solomon Tregaskis, drunk on highway. . . .

There were no less than twenty-four names on the list; and each was

the name of a retainer or pensioner of Sir Felix--those aged

Arcadians of Kirris-vean.

I glanced along the table and winced as I met Sir Felix's eyes.

He was inclining towards me. 'Five shillings and costs will meet

this case, eh?' he was asking. I nodded, though without a notion of

what case we were hearing. (It turned out to be one of

cattle-straying, so no great harm was done.) Beyond him I saw Lord

Rattley covering an infernally wicked grin with his arched palm;

beyond Lord Rattley two estimable magistrates staring at that fatal

supplementary paper as though they had dined and this was a bill they

found themselves wholly unable to meet.

Sir Felix from time to time finds his awards of justice gently

disputed. No one disputed them to-day. Lord Rattley, whose language

is younger than his years, declared afterwards--between explosions of

indecent mirth--that we left the floor to the old man, and he

waltzed. He fined three parents for not sending their children to

school, made out an attendance order upon another, mulcted a youth in

five shillings for riding a bicycle without a light, charged a navvy

ten shillings and costs for use of indelicate language (total,

seventeen and sixpence), and threatened, but did not punish, a farmer

with imprisonment for working a horse 'when,' as the charge put it

ambiguously, 'in an unfit state.' He wound up by transferring an

alehouse licence, still in his stride, beamed around and observed

'That concludes our business, I think--eh, Mr Clerk?'

'Supplementary cases, y'r Worship,' murmured the Clerk. 'If I may

remind--paper handed to y'r Worship--'

'Eh? Yes, to be sure--'

'Number of cases, drunk and disorderly: arising--as I understand--out

of Regatta held yesterday at Kirris-vean.'

The Superintendent arose. He is an amazingly tall man, and it seemed

to me that he took an amazingly long time in arising to his full

height.

'Impossible to accommodate them all in the cells, y'r Worship.

If I may say so, the police were hard worked all night.

Mercifully'--the Superintendent laid stress on the word, and I shall

always, when I think of it, remember to thank him--'the most of 'em

were _blind_. We laid 'em out on the floor of the charge-room, and

with scarcely an exception, as I am credibly informed, they've come

to, more or less.'

'Kirris-vean?' I saw Sir Felix's hands grip the arms of his chair.

Then he put them out and fumbled with his papers. Lord Rattley

obligingly pushed forward his copy of the list.

'Shall I have the defendants brought into Court at once?' asked the

Superintendent. 'The constables tell me that they are--er--mostly,

by this time, in a condition to understand, for all practical

purposes, the meaning of an oath.'

Sir Felix has--as I have hinted--his foibles. But he is an English

gentleman and a man of courage. He gasped, waved a hand, and sat up

firmly.

He must have needed courage indeed, as the sorry culprits filed into

Court: for I verily believe he felt more shame than they, though

their appearance might be held to prove this impossible. The police

at about eleven o'clock had raided the booth of that respectable

landlord, Mr Bates ('Which,' observed the Superintendent, stonily,

'we may 'ave somethink to say to 'im, as it were, by-and-by') and had

culled some of them--even as one picks the unresisting primrose,

others not without recourse to persuasion. 'Many of 'em,' the

Superintendent explained, 'showed a liveliness you wouldn't believe.

It was, in a manner of speaking, beyond anythink y'r Worships would

expect.' He paused a moment, cleared his throat, and achieved this

really fine phrase: 'It was, for their united ages, in a manner of

speaking, a knock-out.'

I see them now as they filed into court--yellow in the gills, shaking

between present fear and the ebb of excess. But I see Sir Felix

also, a trifle red in the face, gripping the arms of his chair,

bending forward and confronting them.

For a moment I imagined he meant to address them as a crowd. But his

fine sense of business prevailed, and he signed to the Clerk to read

the first charge.

He dealt with the charges, one by one, and in detail. Alone he

inflicted the fines, while we sat and listened with eyes glued upon

the baize table. And the fines were heavy--too heavy. It was not

for us to interfere.

At the end I expected some few words of general rebuke. I believe

the culprits themselves would have been glad of a tongue-lashing.

But he uttered none. To the end he dealt out justice, none aiding

him; and when the business was over, pushed back his chair.

We filed out after him. I believe that he has paid all the fines out

of his own pocket.

And Troy laughs. But I believe it is safe to say that, while Sir

Felix lives, Kirris-vean will not hold a second Regatta.

COLONEL BAIGENT'S CHRISTMAS.

Outside the railway station Colonel Baigent handed his carpet-bag to

the conductor of the hotel omnibus, and stood for a moment peering

about in the dusk, as if to take his bearings.

'For The Dragon, sir?' asked the conductor.

'The Dragon?' Yes, certainly,' echoed Colonel Baigent, aroused by

the name from the beginnings of a brown study. 'So The Dragon is

still standing, eh?'

''Twas standing all right when I left it, twenty minutes ago,' the

man answered flippantly; for to-night was Christmas Eve, and English

hotel servants do not welcome guests who stay over Christmas.

But the colonel remarked nothing amiss in his tone. In fact, he was

not listening. He stared out into the mirk beyond the flare of gas

in the entrance-way, slowly bringing his mind to bear on the city at

his feet, with its maze of dotted lights. The afternoon had been

cold and gusty, with now and then a squall of hail from the

north-west. The mass of the station buildings behind him blotted out

whatever of daylight yet lingered. Eastward a sullen retreating

cloud backed the luminous haze thrown up from hundreds of

street-lamps and shop-windows--a haze that faintly silhouetted the

clustered roofs. The roofs were wet. The roadway, narrowing as it

descended the hill, shone with recent rain.

'You may carry down my bag,' said the colonel. 'I will walk.

Somewhere to the right here should be a road leading to Westgate,

eh?'

'Tisn't the shortest way,' the conductor objected.

'I have plenty of time,' said the colonel mildly.

Indeed, a milder-looking man for a hero--he had earned and won his

V.C.--or a gentler of address, could scarcely be conceived; or an

older-fashioned. His voice, to be sure, had a latent tone of

command. But the patient face, with its drooping moustache and long

gray side-whiskers; the short yet attenuated figure, in a tweed suit

of no particular cut; the round felt hat, cheap tie, and

elastic-sided boots--all these failed very signally to impress the

conductor, who flung the carpet-bag inside the omnibus with small

ceremony, and banged the door.

'Right, Bill!' he called.

''Oo is it?' asked the driver, slewing round in the light of his

near-side lamp.

'Might be a commercial--if 'twasn't for his bag, and his way of

speakin'.'

The omnibus rattled off and down the hill. Colonel Baigent gazed

after it, alone beneath the gas-lamp; for the few passengers who had

alighted from his train had jostled past him and gone their ways, and

his porter had turned back wearily into the station, where express

and excursion trains had all day been running the Christmas traffic

down to its last lees.

Colonel Baigent gazed after the omnibus, then back through the

passage-way leading past the booking-office to the platform.

All this was new to him. There had been no such thing as railway or

railway station thirty-five years ago, when, a boy of seventeen just

emancipated from school, he had climbed to the box-seat of the then

famous 'Highflyer' coach, and been driven homewards to a Christmas in

which the old sense of holiday mingled and confused itself with a new

and wonderful feeling that school was over and done with for ever.

During his Indian exile he had nursed a long affection for the city;

had collected and pored over books relating to it and its

antiquities; and now, as he left the station and struck boldly into

the footway on the right, he found himself surprisingly at home.

The path led him over a footbridge, and along between high garden

walls. But it led him surely enough to Westgate, and the spot

occupied in Norman times (as he recalled) by five bordels or

shanties, where any belated traveller ('such as I to-night,' thought

the colonel) arriving after the gates were shut, might find

hospitality for the love of God. The suburb here lay deserted.

He halted, and listened to a footfall that died away into the

darkness on his right. He felt at home again--here, wrapped around

by the ghostly centuries as by the folds of a mantle, and warm within

the folds.

Strange to say, the chill came on him as he passed under the arch of

Westgate, and into view of the busy High Street, the lit shops, the

passers-by jostling upon the pavements, the running newsboys, the

hawkers with their barrows, the soldiers strolling five abreast down

the middle of the roadway. Here was the whole city coming and going.

Here, precisely as he had left it thirty-five years ago, it sprang

back into life again, like an illuminated clockwork. No; he was

wrong, of course. It had been working all the while, and without

intermission, absorbed in its own business--buying and selling,

marrying and giving in marriage. He had dropped out, that was all.

The Christmas decorations, the jollity in the voices exchanging

Christmas salutations, aggravated the poor colonel's sense of

homelessness, and seemed to mock it. One window displayed a huge

boar's head, grinning, with a lemon in its mouth. The proprietor of

another had hung his seasonable wares on a small spruce fir, and lit

it all over with coloured candles. A poulterer, three doors away,

had draped his house-front, from the third story down, with what at

first glance appeared to be a single heavy curtain of furs and

feathers--string upon string of hares, of pheasants, of turkeys, fat

geese, wild ducks.

This prevailing superabundant good cheer did not, however, extend to

the visitor, as the colonel discovered, within the doorway of The

Dragon. Nor was that doorway the old hospitable entrance through

which the stage-coaches had rattled into a paved court lined with

red-windowed offices. The new proprietor had blocked all this up

with a flight of steps, and an arrangement of mahogany and

plate-glass. There remained but the arch under which, these years

ago, the stout coachman, as he swung his leaders sharp round to the

entry, had warned passengers to duck their heads. The colonel was

staring up at it when he became aware of a liveried boots holding the

mahogany door open for him at the head of the steps, and with an

expression that did not include 'Welcome!' among the many things that

it said.

The boots too plainly was sullen, the young lady in the office curt

and off-hand, the second and only waiter as nearly as possible

mutinous. 'All his blooming companions,' he explained (though not

precisely in these words), had departed to spend Christmas in the

bosom of their families. He spoke cockney English, and, in reply to

a question (for the colonel tried hard to draw him into conversation

and dissipate his gloom), confessed that he came from Brixton.

Further than this he would not go. In a mortuary silence, the

colonel, seated beneath a gasalier adorned (the mockery of it!) with

a sprig of mistletoe, sipped his half-pint of sherry, and ate his way

through three courses of a sufficiently good dinner. But better,

says Solomon, is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox

and hatred therewith.

Every time he raised his eyes they rested on the table at which he

had dined with his father on the eve of being entered at school.

The same table, the same heavy mahogany chairs--he recalled the

scroll pattern on their backs. He could see himself there in the

corner--a small boy, white in the face and weary with travel, divided

between surmise of the morrow and tears for the home left behind.

He could see his father seated there in profile, the iron-gray hair,

the remembered stoop. Well, they were all gone now--all, missing

whom that night he had come so near to breaking down and weeping.

. . . Mother, sisters, brother, gone one by one during the years of

his Indian exile, and himself now left the last of his race,

unmarried, and never likely to marry. Why had he come? To revisit

his old school? But the school would be closed for the Christmas

holidays, the children dispersed to their homes and happy.

Limen amabile

Matris et oscula . . .

He had ordered claret--a bottle of Lafitte, the best the house could

produce--and the waiter, impressed a little by the choice, now

appeared noiselessly, almost deferentially, at his elbow, and poured

out a first glassful of the wine.

'Waiter!'

'Yessir!'

'Where does that music come from?'--for the sound of an antiquated

piano had been thrumming for some minutes from a distant room.

The music was not ambitious--an old set of quadrille tunes.

The colonel did not recognise it. He had no ear at all for music,

and could just distinguish the quickstep of his regiment from

'God save the Queen.' In fact, when he paid any attention at all to

music (and this was rare), it gave him no sensation beyond a vague

discomfort.

'It comes from the Assembly Room, sir, at the back of the Court.'

'Ah! yes, I remember the old Assembly Room. Some one is giving a

ball to-night?'

The waiter smiled indulgently. 'Oh no, sir! It's Miss Wallas's

dancing-class breaking up--that's all.'

'Breaking up?' echoed the colonel, whose mind was sometimes a trifle

slow in the uptake.

'She rents the room alternate Fridays, sir, and usually gives 'em a

little treat just before Christmas. I don't know,' pursued the

waiter, meditatively laying two fingers wide on his chin, 'as many

people would call it a treat. But the little 'uns likes dressing up

in their evening frocks, and the buns and lemonade is well enough

for their time of life. There used to be a fiddle too, as well as

the piano; but the class hev fallen off considerable of late.

The management don't like it too well. But there's a notion 'twould

be unfeelin' to stop it. She's been carrying it on all these years,

and her aunt before her. But if it annoys you, sir, I can say a word

at the office and get it stopped.'

'Heaven forbid!' said the colonel. But the music made him

uncomfortable, nevertheless. It broke off, and started again upon a

waltz tune. After the waltz came a mazurka, and after the mazurka

another set of quadrilles. And still, as he sipped his claret, the

successive tunes wove themselves into old memories haunting the

coffee-room--ghostly memories! Yet he had no will to escape them.

Outside he could see the crowd jostling to and fro on the opposite

pavement. The lights within a chemist's shop, shining through

bottles of coloured water in its window, threw splashes of colour--

green, crimson, orange--on the eager faces as they went by.

Colonel Baigent rose half impatiently, drew down the blind, and,

returning to his chair, sat alone with the ghosts.

The waiter brought dessert--a plateful of walnuts and dried figs.

He cracked a walnut and peeled it slowly, still busy with his

thoughts. For a while these thoughts were all in a far past; but

by-and-by a stray thread carried him down to the year 'fifty-seven--

and snapped suddenly. His thoughts always broke off suddenly at the

year 'fifty-seven--the Mutiny year. In that year he had won his

Victoria Cross and, along with it, a curious tone in his voice, an

inexpressible gentleness with all women and children, certain

ineradicable lines in his face (hidden though they were by his

drooping moustache and absurd old-fashioned whiskers); also a certain

very grave simplicity when addressing the Almighty in his prayers.

But he never thought of the year 'fifty-seven if he could help it.

And as a spider, its thread snapping, drops upon the floor, so

Colonel Baigent fell to earth out of his dreaming.

With a sudden impulse of his hands against the table's edge, he

thrust back the chair and stood erect. His bottle of claret was all

but empty, and he bethought him that he had left his cigar-case

upstairs. His bedroom lay on the farther side of the courtyard and

on his way to it he passed the tall windows of the Assembly Room

close enough to fling a glance inside.

The dancers were all children--little girls of all ages from eight to

fourteen, in pretty frocks of muslin--pink, blue, and white; with a

sprinkling of awkward boys in various fashion of evening dress.

On his way back, having lit his cigar, he paused for a longer look.

The piano was tinkling energetically, the company dancing a polka,

and with a will. The boys were certainly an awkward lot, so the

Colonel decided, and forthwith remembered his own first pair of white

kid gloves and the horrible self-consciousness he had indued with

them. He went back to the room where the waiter had laid his coffee.

The polka, as it proved, was the last dance on the programme; for the

colonel had scarcely settled himself again before the piano strummed

out 'God save the Queen'--which, as has been said, was one of the

tunes he knew. He stood erect, alone in the empty room, and so

waited gravely for the last bar. A rush of feet followed; a pause

for robing; then childish voices in the courtyard wishing each other

'Good-night!' and 'A merry Christmas!' Then a very long pause, and

the colonel supposed that all the young guests were gone.

But they were not all gone; for as he resumed his seat, and reached

out a hand for his case, to choose another cigar, he happened to

throw a glance towards the doorway. And there, in the shadow of a

heavy curtain draping it, stood a little girl.

She might have passed for a picture of Red Riding-Hood; for she wore

a small scarlet cloak over her muslin frock, and the hood of it had

been pulled forward and covered all but a margin of hair above the

brows. The colour of her hair was a bright auburn, that of her

eyebrows so darkly brown as to seem wellnigh black; and altogether

she made a remarkable little figure, standing there in the doorway,

with a pair of white satin dancing-shoes clutched in her hand.

'Oh!' said the colonel. 'Good-evening!'

'O-o-oh!' answered the child, and with a catch, as it were, and a

thrill in the voice that astonished him. Her eyes, fixed on his,

grew larger and rounder. She came a pace or two towards him on

tiptoe, halted, clasped both hands over her dancing-shoes, and

exclaimed, with a deeper thrill than before:--

'You are Colonel Baigent!'

'Eh?' The colonel sat bolt upright.

'Yes; and Aunt Louisa will be glad!'

He put a hand up to the crown of his head. 'Good Lord!' he murmured,

staring wildly around the room, and then slowly fastening his gaze

upon the child--at most she could not be more than nine years old--

confronting him. 'Good Lord! Will she?'

'Yes; and so am I!' She nodded, and her eyes seemed to be devouring

while they worshipped him. 'But wasn't it clever of me to know you

at once?'

'It's--it's about the cleverest thing I've come across in all my born

days,' stammered Colonel Baigent, collapsing into his chair, and then

suddenly clutching the arms of it and peering forward.

'But, of course, I've known you for ever so long, really,' she went

on, and nodded again as if to reassure him.

'Oh! "of course," is it? I--I say, won't you sit down and have a

nut or two--or a fig?'

'Thank you.' She gave him quite a grown-up bow, and seated herself.

'I'll take a fig; nuts give you the indigestion at this time of

night.' She picked up a fig demurely, and laid it on a plate he

pushed towards her. 'I hope I'm behaving nicely?' she said, looking

up at him with the most engaging candour; 'because Aunt Louisa says

you always had the most beautiful manners. In fact, that's what made

her take to you, long--oh! ever so long--before you became famous.

And now you're the Bayard of India!'

'But, excuse me--'

She had begun to munch her fig, but interrupted him with another nod.

'Yes, I know what you are going to say. That's the name they give to

another general out in India, don't they? But Aunt Louisa declares

he won't hold a candle to you--though I don't know why he should want

to do anything of the sort.'

'It's uncommonly kind of your Aunt Louisa--' he began again.

'Do you know her?' the child asked, with disconcerting directness.

'That's just the trouble with me' Colonel Baigent confessed.

'She is my great-aunt, really. She lives in Little Swithun, right

at the back of Dean's Close; and her name is on a brass plate--a

very hard name to pronounce, "Miss Lapenotiere, Dancing and

Calisthenics"--that's another hard word, but it means things you do

with an elastic band to improve your figure. The plate doesn't

azackly tell the truth, because she has been an invalid for years

now, and Aunt Netta--that's my other aunt--had to carry on the

business. But everybody knows about it, so there really is no

deceit. Aunt Netta's name is Wallas, and so is mine. Her mother was

sister to Aunt Louisa, and she tells us we come of very good family.

She never married. I don't believe she ever wanted to marry anybody

but you, and now it's too late. But I call it splendid, your turning

up like this. And on Christmas Eve, to!'

'It's beginning to be splendid,' owned the colonel, who had partly

recovered himself. 'Unhappily--since you put it so--it is, I fear, a

fact that I never met your Aunt Louisa.'

'Oh! but you did--in the street, and once in the post office, when

you were a boy at the college.'

'Such impressions are fleeting, my dear, as you will live to prove.

Your other aunt, Miss Netta--'

'Oh! she will have been born after your time,' said the child, with

calm, unconscious cruelty. 'But you will see her presently. She has

gone to the bar to pay the bill, and when she has finished disputing

it she is bound to call for me.'

As if it had been waiting to confirm the prophecy, a voice called,

'Charis! Charis!' almost on the instant.

'That's my name,' said the child, helping herself to another fig, as

a middle-aged face, wrinkled, with a complexion of parchment under a

mass of tow-coloured hair, peered in at the doorway.

The colonel rose. 'Your niece, madam,' he began, 'has been

entertaining me for these ten minutes--'

With that he stopped, perceiving that, after a second glance at him,

the eyes of Aunt Netta, too, were growing round in her head.

'Charis, you naughty child! Sir, I do hope--but she has been

troubling you, I am sure--' stammered Aunt Netta, and came to a full

stop.

Charis clapped her hands, with a triumphant little laugh.

'But I knew him first!' she exclaimed, 'Yes, Aunt Netta, it's him!--

it's him, _him_, HIM! And isn't it just perfectly glorious?'

'You must excuse my niece, sir--that is to say, if you are really

Colonel--'

'Baigent, ma'am. I think you know my name; though how or why that

should be, passes my comprehension.'

She bowed to him, timidly, a trifle stiffly. 'It is an honour to

have met you, sir. I have an aunt at home, an invalid, who will be

very proud when she hears of this. She has followed your career with

great interest--I believe I may say, ever since you were a boy at the

college. She has talked about you so often, you must forgive the

child for being excited. Come, Charis! Thank Colonel Baigent, and

say good-night.'

'But isn't he coming with us?' The child's face fell, and her voice

was full of dismay. 'Oh! but you must! Aunt Louisa will cry her

eyes out if you don't. And on Christmas Eve, too!'

Colonel Baigent looked at Miss Netta.

'I couldn't ask it--I really couldn't,' she murmured.

He smiled. 'The hour is unconventional, to be sure. But if your

aunt will forgive a very brief call there is nothing would give me

greater pleasure.'

He meant it, too!

He fetched his hat, and the three passed out together--down the High

Street, through the passage by the Butter Cross, and along the railed

pavement by the Minster Close. On the colonel's ear their three

footfalls sounded as though a dream. The vast bulk of the minster,

glimmering above the leafless elms, the solid Norman tower with its

edges bathed in starlight, were transient things, born of faery,

unsubstantial as the small figure that tripped ahead of him clutching

a pair of dancing-shoes.

They came to a little low house, hooded with dark tiles and deeply

set in a narrow garden. A dwarf wall and paling divided it from the

Close, and from the gate, where a brass plate twinkled, a flagged,

uneven pathway led up to the front door. So remote it lay from all

traffic, so well screened by the shadow of the minster, that the

inmates had not troubled to draw blind or curtain. Miss Netta,

pausing while she fumbled for the latchkey, explained that her aunt

had a fancy to keep the blinds up, so that when the minster was lit

for evensong she might watch the warm, painted windows without moving

from her couch.

Colonel Baigent, glancing at the pane towards which she waved a hand,

caught one glimpse of the room within, and stood still, with a catch

of his breath. On the wall facing him hung an Oxford frame, and in

the frame was a cheap woodcut, clipped from an old illustrated paper

of the Mutiny date, and fastened in that place of honour--his own

portrait!

After that, for a few minutes, his head swam. He was dimly aware of

what followed: of an open door; of the child running past him and

into the room with cries of joy and explanation, a few only

articulate; of the little old figure that half rose from the couch

and sank back trembling; the flush on the waxen face, the violet

ribbons in the cap, the hand that trembled as it reached out,

incredulous in its humility, to his own. He took it, and her other

hand rested a moment on the back of his, as though it fluttered a

blessing.

Yes; and her hands, when he released them--and it seemed that he had

been holding an imprisoned bird--yet trembled on the coverlet after

her voice had found steadiness.

'An honour--a great honour!' it was saying. 'You will forgive the

liberty?' She nodded towards the portrait. 'We are not quite

strangers, you see. I have always followed your career, sir. I knew

you would grow into a great and worthy man, ever since the day when I

dropped a bandbox in the street--a muddy day it was!--and the box

burst open just as you were passing with half a dozen young gentlemen

from the college. The rest laughed; and when I began to cry--for the

ribbons were muddied--they laughed still more. Do you remember?'

Colonel Baigent had not the faintest recollection of it.

'Ah! but it all happened. And you--you were the only one that

did not laugh. You picked up the box and wiped it with your

handkerchief. You tried to wipe the ribbons, too; but that only made

matters worse. And then, when the others made fun of you, you put

the box under your arm, and said you were going to carry it home for

me. And so you did, though it made you late for your books; and

besides, our house was out of bounds, and you risked a thrashing for

it.'

'I wonder if I got it?' murmured Colonel Baigent.

'I knew nothing about the school bounds at the time, or I should

never have allowed you! And on the way you asked me if I had hurt

myself in falling. I told you "No"; but that was a fib, for my hip

was growing weak even then. It's by reason of my hip that I have to

lie here. But in those days there was no one else to take the

dancing classes, and it would never have done to confess. And--and

that was all. I only met you once after that--it was in the post

office at St Swithun's, and you ran in to get a stamp. I was

standing by the counter, weighing a letter; and you, being in a

hurry, did not recognise me. But I asked the old postmistress your

name. Do you remember her?'

'She knew everybody's name,' said the colonel. 'And so that was

all?'

'That was all, except that my blessing has gone with you, sir, from

that day. Man and boy it has gone with you.'

'Ma'am, if I had guessed it, some weary days in India might have been

less weary.'

So they sat talking for a while; but, by degrees, the invalid's eyes

had grown pre-occupied.

'Netta, dear,' she asked at length, 'do you think we might ask the

colonel to honour us by sharing our Christmas dinner to-morrow?'

In that luckless moment Colonel Baigent glanced up, caught sight of

Miss Netta's face, and saw that in it which made his own colour to

the roots of his hair. Then he gave a gulp, and faced the situation

like the brave man he was.

'Ma'am,' he said gently, 'you have taken me for a friend, and God

knows, my friends are few enough. I am going to treat you as a very

old friend, and to dismiss all tact. You will eat your Christmas

dinner with me to-morrow, here, in this house.'

On his way back to the hotel Colonel Baigent halted to stare up at

the minster tower. So much of his life had been spent under the

shadow of it!--and yet, of all his sowing, one small act alone, long

forgotten, had taken root here and survived.

In his dreams next morning he heard the minster bell ringing for

early service. In his dreams, for a stroke or two, the remembered

note of it carried him back to boyhood. Then he awoke with a start,

and jumped out of bed.

Far up the hill the bugles from the barracks challenged the note of

the bell. Over the muslin blind drawn half-way across his window the

sun shone on a clear, frosty morning; and in the haze of it, as he

dressed, his eyes rested, across the clustered roofs, on an angle of

the minster tower, and beyond it on the hill with the quarry hewn in

its side, and the clump of trees remembered of all who in boyhood

have been sons of the city's famous school.

He dressed rapidly. The street below had not yet awakened to

Christmas Day, and the colonel, with Christmas in his heart, felt

eager as a messenger of good news.

An hour later, as he returned, all refreshed in soul, from the

minster, he ran against the second waiter, blinking in the sunlight

on the door-step of the hotel, and looking as though he had slept in

his evening suit.

'I want breakfast at once,' said the colonel; 'and for luncheon you

may put me up a basket.'

'There was to have been a cold turkey,' said the waiter, 'it being

Christmas Day.'

'Put in the turkey, then--the whole turkey, please--and two bottles

of champagne. I'll take my luncheon out.'

'Two bottles, sir, did I understand you to say?'

'Certainly. Two bottles.'

'Which the amount for corkage is cruel,' said the waiter as he

delivered his order at the office. 'My word, and what an appetite!

But I done him an injustice in one respec'. He do seem to be every

inch a gentleman.'

So the waiter's verdict, after all, sounded much the same as Miss

Lapenotiere's. And the conclusion seems to be that you can not only

say the same thing in different ways, but quite different things in

identical words.

DOCTOR UNONIUS.

CHAPTER I.

'In all his life he never engaged in a law suit. Reader, try if you

can go so far and be so good a man.'

Thus concludes the epitaph of Doctor Unonius, upon a modest stone in

the churchyard of Polpeor, in Cornwall, of which parish he was,

during his life, the general friend, as his scientific reputation now

abides its boast.

To those who knew him in life there is a gentle irony in the thought

that while, during life, his scientific attainments earned him

nothing but neglect, their recognition grows now proportionately as

the man himself, his face and habit, the spruce black suit he wore,

and the thousand small acts of kindness he did, fade out of memory.

'Your late eminent fellow-parishioner, now these forty years with

God,'--so the Bishop of the Diocese spoke the other day before

unveiling a stained-glass window to that memory in Polpeor Church.

The Bishop, you see, spoke of eternal life in terms of time--a habit

with us all. If anything could be more certain than that, in

whatever bliss Doctor Unonius now inherits, forty years--or a

thousand for that matter--count as one day, it is that throughout his

life he detested stained-glass. Through this very window, indeed,

now obscured _ad majorem gloriam Dei et in memoriam Johannis Unonii

medicinae doctoris_, he loved--for it faced his pew--to watch during

sermon-time the blue sky, the clouds, the rooks at their business in

the churchyard elms. He has even recorded (in an essay on 'Visions'

read before the Tregantick Literary and Scientific Society in the

winter session of 1856) that once, awaking with a start in the middle

of Parson Grylls's sermon, he distinctly saw suspended in these same

elm-tops the image of an abnormally long pilot-fish (_naucretes

ductor_) he had received from a fishing-boat overnight and left at

home in his surgery mounted upon an apparatus of his own invention,

ready to be sketched before dissection. _Piscium et summa genus

haesit ulmo_ . . . for twenty seconds, rubbing his eyes, he stared at

the apparition as it very slowly faded.

It is on his researches in ichthyology, his list (no short one) of

discoveries, his patient classification of British Fishes, that his

fame rests. 'Why "British"?' the reader may ask. 'Have fishes,

then, our nationalities?' The doctor liked to think so. He was a

lover of his country, and for three years, while Napoleon threatened

us with invasion, he had served as a second-lieutenant in that famous

company, the East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery, better known as

the Looe Die-hards. Now, in times of peace, with Britain supreme

upon the seas, he boldly claimed for her every fish found off these

shores. A sturgeon, even, might not visit our coastal waters,

however casual the occasion, without receiving the compliment of

citizenship for himself and his tribe. Yet Doctor Unonius patiently

tracked these creatures in their most distant migrations--'_motus et

migrationes diligentissime indagavit_,' says the mural tablet beneath

the window. The three lights of the window represent (1) Jonah

vomited by the Whale, (2) the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, and (3)

St Peter, John Dory and the stater.

Polpeor, you must know, is a fishing-haven on the south coast of

Cornwall, famous during the Napoleonic Wars for its privateering, and

for its smuggling scarcely less notorious down to the middle of the

last century. The doctor's parents, though of small estate, had

earned by these and more legitimate arts enough money to set them

dreaming of eminence for their only child, and sent him up to London

to Guy's Hospital, where he studied surgery under the renowned Mr

Astley Cooper. Having qualified himself in this and in medicine, he

returned to his native home, which he never again left--save now and

then for a holiday--until the day of his death.

Assiduous in visiting the sick, he found the real happiness of his

life (one might almost say its real business) in his scientific and

literary recreations. The range and diversity of these may be

gathered from a list of his published writings: 'The Efficacy of

Digitalis Applied to Scrofula,' 'On the Carpenter Bee (Apis

Centuncularis),' 'Domestic Usage and Economy in the Reign of

Elizabeth,' 'A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes,' 'The Fabulous

Foundation of the Popedom' (abridged from Bernard), 'Migratory Birds

of the West of England,' 'God's Arrow against Atheism and

Irreligion,' 'A Dissertation on the Mermaid,' 'Observations on the

Natural History of the Chameleon,' 'Ditto on the Jewish and Christian

Sabbath Days,' 'Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of Apple

Trees,' 'Contributions to a Classification of British Crustacea,'

'On Man as the Image of the Deity,' '_Daulias Advena_; or, the

Migrations of the Swallow Tribe.' We select these from the output of

one decade only. A little later the activity grows less

miscellaneous, and he is drifting upon his _magnum opus_, as the

titles indicate, 'Some Particulars of Rare Fishes found in Cornwall,'

'An Account of a Fish nearly allied to Hemiranphus,' 'On the

Occurrence of the Crustacean Scyllurus Arctus.'

He would announce these strange visitors--_sepia biserialis_, for an

instance--with no less eagerness than a journalist hails the advent

of a foreign potentate. He had invented, as we have said, an

apparatus on which he mounted them, with a jet of salt water that

played over their scales and kept fresh, as he maintained, the

delicate hues he copied from his water-colour box; with what success

let anybody judge who has studied the four great volumes wherein

these drawings survive, reproduced by lithography, and published by

subscription.

Immersed in these studies, Doctor Unonius found no leisure to think

of matrimony; and his friends and neighbours often took occasion to

deplore it, for he was an extremely personable man, fresh-coloured

and hale, of clean and regular habits, and, moreover, kind-hearted to

a fault. All Polpeor agreed that he needed a wife to look after him,

to protect him from being robbed; and Polpeor (to do it justice) did

not say this without knowledge. The good man could never be

persuaded that Polpeor folk--_his_ folk--were capable of doing him a

wrong; but certain it is that learnedly as he wrote 'On the

Cultivation of Apple Trees,' the fruit of his carefully tended

standards and espaliers seldom arrived at his own table.

They burgeoned, they bloomed; the blossom 'pitched,' as we say in the

West; the fruit swelled, ripened, and then--

Garden shows were rarities in those days: but Tregarrick (Polpeor's

nearest market town) boasted a Horticultural Society and an annual

Exhibition. Whether from indolence or modesty Doctor Unonius never

competed, but he seldom missed to visit the show and to con the

exhibits. The date was then, and is to this day, the Feast of St

Matthew, which falls on the twenty-first of September: and one year,

on the morrow of St Matthew's Feast, the doctor, gazing pensively

over his orchard gate at a noble tree of fruit, remarked to his

friend and next-door neighbour, Captain Minards, late of the merchant

service--

'Do you know, Minards, I was at Tregarrick yesterday; and I think--

yes, without vaunting, I really think that the best of my pearmains

yonder would have stood a fair chance of the prize for Table

Varieties.'

'The prize?' grunted Captain Minards. 'Don't you fret about that:

you won it all right.'

'Eh?' queried Doctor Unonius, wiping his spectacles.

'Ay,' said Captain Minards, filling a pipe; 'you won it, right

enough.'

'But--'

'There's no "but" about it. And what vexes me,' pursued Captain

Minards, 'is that the rascals don't even trouble to rob you neatly.

See that branch broken, yonder.'

'That's with the weight of the crop.'

'Weight o' my fiddlestick! And the ground all strewed with short

twigs!'

'The wind's doing.'

'When you know the weather has been flat calm for a week past!'

'There's an extraordinary eddy just here, at the turn of the valley;

I have often observed a puff of wind--you might almost call it a

gust--spring up with no apparent reason.'

'Well, you're a man of science,' Captain Minards replied doggedly,

'and if you tell me this puff o' wind carried your pearmains all the

way to Tregarrick and entered 'em at the show under some other body's

name, I'm bound to believe you. But I wonder you don't put it into a

book. It's interestin' enough.'

With this Parthian shot he departed. But two nights later he was

awakened in his bedroom, which overlooked the doctor's orchard, by a

strange rustling among the apple trees. _Thud--thud!_--there as he

lay he listened for half a minute to the sounds of the dropping

fruit.

The night was calm. . . . On the wall facing the bed's foot there

hung an old gun. Captain Minards arose, reached it down, loaded it

with a charge of powder, and, stepping to the window, let bang at the

trees. . . . After listening awhile he replaced the gun and retired

to rest.

Next morning Doctor Unonius was called away from his breakfast to

visit Sarah Puckey, an aged market woman or 'regrater,' whom he found

in a state of prostration following (it was alleged) upon a severe

nervous shock. He attended the old woman for the remainder of her

days, which were few; and while they lasted she remained--in the

language of Polpeor--a 'bedrider.' She never confided to him the

nature of the shock which had laid her low; but at the last,

satisfied of her own salvation, she worried herself sadly over the

doctor and his defenceless life.

'I'm a saved woman,' she declared, 'and a dyin' old woman, and these

things be clear to my eyes. A wife--that's what you want. Your

laudanums and your doldadums and your nummy-dummies[1] may be all

very well--'

'What are they?' asked the doctor.

'Latin,' she answered promptly. 'I be a dyin' woman, I tell 'ee, an'

got the gift o' tongues. . . . And your 'natomies and fishes' innards

may be all very well, but you want a wife to look after the money an'

tell the men to wipe their sea-boots 'pon the front mat. When it

comes to their unpickin' a trawl in your very drawin'-room, an' fish

scales all over the best Brussels, as I've a-see'd 'em before now--'

Mrs Puckey paused for breath.

'Have 'ee ever had a mind to the widow Tresize?' she asked.

'Certainly not,' the doctor answered.

'That's a pity, too: for Landeweddy Farm's her own freehold, an' I've

heard her say more'n once how sorry she feels for you, livin' alone

as you do. I don't everyways like Missus Tresize, but she's a

bowerly woman an' nimble for her age--which can't be forty, not by a

year or two. Old Tresize married her for her looks. I mind goin' to

the weddin', an' she brought en no more'n her clothes an' herself

inside of 'em: an' now she've a-buried th' old doter, an' sits up at

Landeweddy in her own parlour a-playin' the pianner with both hands.

What d'ee reckon a woman does _that_ for?'

'Maybe because she is fond of music,' said Doctor Unonius dryly.

The invalid chuckled, until her old head in its white mob-cap nodded

against the white pillow propping it.

'I married three men mysel' in my time, as you d' know; an' if either

wan had been rich enough to leave me a pianner, I'd ha' married three

more. . . . What tickles me is you men with your talk o' spoort.

Catchin' fish for a business I can understand: you got to do that for

money, which is the first thing in life; an' when you're married, the

woman sees that you don't shirk it. But you make me laugh, puttin'

on airs an' pretendin' to do it for spoort--"Wimmen ha'n't got no

sense o' spoort," says you, all solemn as owls. Soon as a boy turns

fourteen he takes up the trick. "Wimmen ha'n't got no sense o'

spoort," says he, sticking his hands in his breeches pockets; an' off

he goes to hook fish, an' comes swaggerin' back to be taken, catch

an' all, by a young 'ooman that has been sayin' naught but markin'

him down all the time. Spoort? This world, doctor, is made up of

hooks an' eyes: an' you reckon--do 'ee--the best spoort goes to the

hooks? Ask the eyes and the maidens that make 'em.'

The doctor, who had risen and picked up his hat when Mrs Puckey

linked his name with the widow Tresize's, came back and re-seated

himself by the bedside. The old woman enjoyed her chat--it did her

more good than medicine, she said--and so long as she steered it

clear of himself and his private affairs he was willing enough to

indulge her. Nay, he too--being no prude--enjoyed her general

disquisitions on matrimony and the sexes. _Homo sum, etc_.,

. . . He was a great reader of Montaigne, and like Montaigne he

loved listening to folks, however humble, who (as he put it) knew

their subject. Mrs Puckey certainly knew her subject, and if in

experience she fell a little short of Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath,' she

handled it with something of that lady's freedom, and, in detail,

with a plainness of speech worthy of Panurge.

She knew very well that by further reference to Mrs Tresize she

risked cutting short the doctor's visit. Yet, woman-like, she could

not forbear from just one more word.

'She keeps it under the bed.'

'Keeps what?' asked Doctor Unonius.

The old woman chuckled again. 'Why, her money, to be sure--hundreds

an' hundreds o' pounds--in a great iron chest. I wonder she can

sleep o' nights with it, up in that g'e'rt lonely house, an' not a

man within call--Aw, doctor, dear, don't tell me you're _goin'!_'

[1] _Quaere_. Was this some faint inherited memory of 'the old

profession'?--_In nomine domini, etc._