Corporal Sam and Other Stories

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

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.