THE SQUIRE'S GRANDSONS.
WHILST the Squire had been giving old Bluff his deserts in the farm parlour, his three grandsons—none other than the boys whose mother Dick had thought so beautiful—had left the grounds by a winding path that skirted the plantation and emerged on to a fieldway leading into the road a few hundred yards above the farm. Turning to the left hand of the farm, this road ran round the foot of a piece of rising ground. Probably the man who first made a cart-track there, found it pay better to go a little way round than to make his beasts drag their burdens over the hill. But there was a shorter cut for pedestrians almost opposite the pathway from the Manor House; and for this the boys were bound.
Just as they were in the act of crossing the stile, who should come round the bend but the Squire, whose next business took him up that very road. The boys saw him at once. Two of them—the two taller ones—ran forward to meet him, the other following at his quickest pace. The Squire was a favourite with his grandsons. He was such a boy amongst them, although he had been born over eighty years before them; and yet withal he was so grand and courtly.
Will and Sigismund dashed forward, but the Squire looked beyond them to the cripple, who was exerting himself manfully to show equal appreciation of his aged relative.
"Bravo, Hal, bravo!" cried he, applauding with his gold-headed cane.
Will and Sigismund faced about, looking half-ashamed, as if they felt it was almost mean to have taken such an advantage of their afflicted brother. But the Squire did not exactly intend that. It would have been altogether too hard for boys with strong legs to give up using them because their brother limped on irons. It was rather that the Squire had a very tender spot in his heart for Hal, and that he saw in the boy's brave, invincible spirit an earnest of what the man would be.
"God grant that he may grow to be a man!" he often uttered in his heart. And it really seemed that Hal was growing stronger year by year.
Meanwhile Hal, flushed and out of breath, was up with them.
"Where are you going, grandfather?" asked he eagerly, as he swung himself round to walk by the Squire's side, Sigismund making way for him.
"Up to the cottages by the wood gate," replied his grandfather, laying one hand on his shoulder. "Almost out of bounds for you, eh?"